Space Elevator
Scroll up to the Kármán line.
Tags: visualisation
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Tuesday, April 25th, 2023
Wednesday, March 29th, 2023
GB Renewables Map
A lovely bit of real-time data visualisation from Robin:
It’s a personal project created at home in Wales with an aim to explore and visualise renewable energy systems. Specifically, it aims to visualise live generation from renewable energy systems around Great Britain and to show where that generation is physically coming from.
Wednesday, July 27th, 2022
How Florence Nightingale Changed Data Visualization Forever - Scientific American
The design process in action in Victorian England:
Recognizing that few people actually read statistical tables, Nightingale and her team designed graphics to attract attention and engage readers in ways that other media could not. Their diagram designs evolved over two batches of publications, giving them opportunities to react to the efforts of other parties also jockeying for influence. These competitors buried stuffy graphic analysis inside thick books. In contrast, Nightingale packaged her charts in attractive slim folios, integrating diagrams with witty prose. Her charts were accessible and punchy. Instead of building complex arguments that required heavy work from the audience, she focused her narrative lens on specific claims. It was more than data visualization—it was data storytelling.
Pizza Exchange Rate | FlowingData
This is a story about pizza and geometry.
The interactive widget here really demonstrates the difference between showing and telling.
Saturday, February 19th, 2022
Which color scale to use when visualizing data - Datawrapper Blog
A fascinating four-part series by Lisa Charlotte Muth on colour in data visualisations:
Thursday, February 3rd, 2022
When Women Make Headlines
This is a great combination of rigorous research and great data visualisation.
Thursday, October 7th, 2021
Kaleidoscope Brain: 100 Visualizations of Moby-Dick
Download this PDF to see 100 beautiful literary visualisations.
Saturday, October 2nd, 2021
Vonnegut’s Story Shapes | Extraordinary Facility
The next best thing to having Kurt Vonnegut at the blackboard.
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021
THE INTERNET — Opte
Visualising the growth of the internet.
Sunday, February 28th, 2021
Nature 150 Interactive
A beautiful interactive visualisation of every paper published in Nature.
Saturday, February 20th, 2021
Iceberger
Draw an iceberg and see how it will float.
Sunday, January 31st, 2021
Data Visualization and the Modern Imagination - Spotlight at Stanford
There are some beautiful illustrations in this online exhibition of data visualisation in the past few hundred years.
Sunday, January 17th, 2021
Eleanor Lutz - An Orbit Map of the Solar System
A lovely visualisation of asteroids in our solar system.
Monday, November 16th, 2020
CSS Stats
A handy tool for getting an overview of your site’s CSS:
CSS Stats provides analytics and visualizations for your stylesheets. This information can be used to improve consistency in your design, track performance of your app, and diagnose complex areas before it snowballs out of control.
Friday, November 13th, 2020
An Ocean of Books
What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book. The map represents a selection of 113 008 authors and 145 162 books.
This is a poetic experiment where we hope you will get lost for a while.
Sunday, October 18th, 2020
List of Physical Visualizations
A timeline showing the history of non-digital dataviz.
Friday, July 31st, 2020
British & Exotic Mineralogy
A really lovely unmonetisable enthusiasm:
All 2,242 illustrations from James Sowerby’s compendium of knowledge about mineralogy in Great Britain and beyond, drawn 1802–1817 and arranged by color.
You can dive in and explore or read more about the project and how it was made.
It reminds me of Paul’s project, Bradshaw’s Guide: the both take a beloved artifact of the past and bring it online with care, love, and respect.
Saturday, May 23rd, 2020
Why I hate the log graph, and you should too - Geek in Sydney
I must admit I’ve been wincing a little every time I see a graph with a logarithmic scale in a news article about COVID-19. It takes quite a bit of cognitive work to translate to a linear scale and get the real story.
Saturday, April 25th, 2020
Reading
At the beginning of the year, Remy wrote about extracting Goodreads metadata so he could create his end-of-year reading list. More recently, Mark Llobrera wrote about how he created a visualisation of his reading history. In his case, he’s using JSON to store the information.
This kind of JSON storage is exactly what Tom Critchlow proposes in his post, Library JSON - A Proposal for a Decentralized Goodreads:
Thinking through building some kind of “web of books” I realized that we could use something similar to RSS to build a kind of decentralized GoodReads powered by indie sites and an underlying easy to parse format.
His proposal looks kind of similar to what Mark came up with. There’s a title, an author, an image, and some kind of date for when you started and/or finished reading the book.
Matt then points out that RSS gets close to the data format being suggested and asks how about using RSS?:
Rather than inventing a new format, my suggestion is that this is RSS plus an extension to deal with books. This is analogous to how the podcast feeds are specified: they are RSS plus custom tags.
Like Matt, I’m in favour of re-using existing wheels rather than inventing new ones, mostly to avoid a 927 situation.
But all of these proposals—whether JSON or RSS—involve the creation of a separate file, and yet the information is originally published in HTML. Along the lines of Matt’s idea, I could imagine extending the h-entry collection of class names to allow for books (or films, or other media). It already handles images (with u-photo). I think the missing fields are the date-related ones: when you start and finish reading. Those fields are present in a different microformat, h-event in the form of dt-start and dt-end. Maybe they could be combined:
<article class="h-entry h-event h-review">
<h1 class="p-name p-item">Book title</h1>
<img class="u-photo" src="image.jpg" alt="Book cover.">
<p class="p-summary h-card">Book author</p>
<time class="dt-start" datetime="YYYY-MM-DD">Start date</time>
<time class="dt-end" datetime="YYYY-MM-DD">End date</time>
<div class="e-content">Remarks</div>
<data class="p-rating" value="5">★★★★★</data>
<time class="dt-published" datetime="YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm">Date of this post</time>
</article>
That markup is simultaneously a post (h-entry) and an event (h-event) and you can even throw in h-card for the book author (as well as h-review if you like to rate the books you read). It can be converted to RSS and also converted to .ics for calendars—those parsers are already out there. It’s ready for aggregation and it’s ready for visualisation.
I publish very minimal reading posts here on adactio.com. What little data is there isn’t very structured—I don’t even separate the book title from the author. But maybe I’ll have a little play around with turning these h-entries into combined h-entry/event posts.
Thursday, February 20th, 2020
Emma Willard’s Maps of Time
The beautiful 19th century data visualisations of Emma Willard unfold in this immersive piece by Susan Schulten.