In this monthly series, I share a combination of cool data visualizations, useful tools and resources, and other visualization miscellany. The field of data visualization is full of experts who publish insights in books and on blogs, and I’ll be using this series to introduce you to a few of them. You can find previous posts by looking at the Exploring Data Visualization tag.

Painting the World with Water

Creating weather predictions is a complex tasks that requires global collaboration and advanced scientific technologies. Most people know very little about how a weather prediction is put together and what is required to make it possible. NASA gives us a little glimpse into the complexities of finding out just how we know if it’s going to rain or snow anywhere in the world.

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In this monthly series, I share a combination of cool data visualizations, useful tools and resources, and other visualization miscellany. The field of data visualization is full of experts who publish insights in books and on blogs, and I’ll be using this series to introduce you to a few of them. You can find previous posts by looking at the Exploring Data Visualization tag.

The unspoken rules of visualization

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In this monthly series, I share a combination of cool data visualizations, useful tools and resources, and other visualization miscellany. The field of data visualization is full of experts who publish insights in books and on blogs, and I’ll be using this series to introduce you to a few of them. You can find previous posts by looking at the Exploring Data Visualization tag.

Which milk has the smallest impact on the planet?

Climate change impacts each of us in direct and indirect ways. Mitigating your personal carbon footprint is an important way to address climate change for many people, but often people are unsure how to make choices that benefit the climate. Daniela Haake from Datawrapper took a close look at how her choice to have milk in her coffee was damaging or benefiting the planet and it turns out things aren’t looking great for café con leche. The chart Haake published, created using data from Dr. Joseph Poore, compares the carbon emissions, land use, and water use of milk and the top 4 milk alternatives.

Soy milk has the lowest overall impact on carbon emissions, land use, and water use.

Here’s Who Owns the Most Land in America

“The 100 largest owners of private property in the U.S., newcomers and old-timers together, have 40 million acres, or approximately 2% of the country’s land mass,” Bloomberg News reports. The people who own this land are the richest people in the country, and their wealth has grown significantly over the last 10 years. Bloomberg created a map that demonstrates where the land these people own is located. Compared to the rest of the country, the amount of land owned by these people looks relatively small—could Bloomberg have presented more information about why it is significant that these people own land in these areas? And about why they own so much land?

This image shows only the land owned by the top 10 landowners.

How to Get Better at Embracing Unknowns

Representing our uncertainty in data can be difficult to do clearly and well. In Scientific American this month, Jessica Hullman analyzed different methods of representing uncertainty for their clarity and effectiveness. While there may be no perfect way to represent uncertainty in your data viz, Hullman argues that “the least effective way to present uncertainty is to not show it at all.” Take a look at Hullman’s different ways to represent uncertainty and see if any might work for your next project!

Animated charts make uncertainty impossible to ignore

I hope you enjoyed this data visualization news! If you have any data visualization questions, please feel free to email the Scholarly Commons.

In this monthly series, I share a combination of cool data visualizations, useful tools and resources, and other visualization miscellany. The field of data visualization is full of experts who publish insights in books and on blogs, and I’ll be using this series to introduce you to a few of them. You can find previous posts by looking at the Exploring Data Visualization tag.

A day in the life of Americans: a data comic

By illustrating the activity most Americans are doing at a given hour, Hong highlights what the average day looks like for an American worker.

Happy May, researchers! With the semester winding down and summer plans on the horizon, a lot of us are reflecting on what we’ve done in the past year. Sometimes it can be hard to determine what your daily routine looks like when you are the one doing it every day. Matt Hong created a cute and informative data comic about how we spend our time during the day, based on data from the Census Bureau. Check out Hong’s Medium page for more data comics.

What Qualifies as Middle-Income in Each State

The distribution of middle-income for households made up of four people.

Nathan Yau at Flowing Data created an interesting chart that shows the range of income that is considered “middle-income” in each state and the District of Columbia in the United States. The design of the chart itself is smooth and watching the transitions between income ranges based on number of people in the household is very enjoyable. It is also enlightening to see where states fall on the spectrum of what “middle-income” means, and this visualization could be a useful tool for researchers working on wage disparity.

When People Find a New Job

The bottom of the chart shows jobs that people transition into later in life.

The end of the semester also means a wave of new graduates entering the workforce. While we extend our congratulations to those people, we often inquire about what their upcoming plans are and where they will be working in the future. For some, that question is straightforward; for others, a change of pace may be on the horizon. Nathan Yau of Flowing Data also created a frequency trail chart that shows at what age many people change career paths. As Yau demonstrates in a bar chart that accompanies the frequency trail chart, the majority of job switches happen early and late in life, a phenomenon which he offers some suggestions for.

The peak at the “older” end of the chart indicates some changes post-retirement, but also makes you wonder why people are still finding new jobs at age 85 to 89.

I hope you enjoyed this data visualization news! If you have any data visualization questions, please feel free to email the Scholarly Commons.

In this monthly series, I share a combination of cool data visualizations, useful tools and resources, and other visualization miscellany. The field of data visualization is full of experts who publish insights in books and on blogs, and I’ll be using this series to introduce you to a few of them. You can find previous posts by looking at the Exploring Data Visualization tag.

One Way to Spot a Partisan Gerrymander

Even though it feels like it was 2016 yesterday, we are more than a quarter of the way through 2019 and the 2020 political cycle is starting to heat up. A common issue in the minds of voters and politicians is fraudulent and rigged elections—voters increasingly wonder if their votes really matter in the current political landscape. Last week, the Supreme Court heard two cases on partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina and Maryland. FiveThirtyEight made an elegant visualization about gerrymandering in North Carolina. The visualization demonstrates how actual election outcomes can be used to extrapolate what percentage of seats will go to each party.

If there is no partisan bias in voting districts, the outcome should be 50/50.

As you scroll, the chart continues to develop and become more complicated. It adds results from past elections to contextualize the severity of the current problems with gerrymandering. It also provides an example of the outcomes of a redrawn district map in Pennsylvania.

Mistakes, we’ve drawn a few

The change from line chart to plotted points better demonstrates the trend of the attitudes toward Brexit.

Sarah Leo from The Economist re-creates past visualizations from the publication that were misleading or poorly designed. The blog post calls out the mistakes made very effectively and offers redesigns, when possible. They also make their data available after each visualization.

Seeing two visualizations of the same data next to one another really helps drive home how data can be represented differently–and how that causes different impacts upon a reader.

FastCharts

The Financial Times has made an online version of their quick chart-making tool available for the public. Appropriately titled FastCharts, the site lets you upload your own data or play around with sample data they have provided. Because this tool is so simple, it seems like it would be useful for exploratory data, but maybe not for creating more complex explanations of your data.

FastCharts automatically selects which type of chart it thinks will work best for your data.

Play with the provided example data or use your own data to produce an interesting result! For a challenge, see if any of the data in our Numeric Data Library Guide can work for this tool.

I hope you enjoyed this data visualization news! If you have any data visualization questions, please feel free to email the Scholarly Commons.

In this monthly series, I share a combination of cool data visualizations, useful tools and resources, and other visualization miscellany. The field of data visualization is full of experts who publish insights in books and on blogs, and I’ll be using this series to introduce you to a few of them. You can find previous posts by looking at the Exploring Data Visualization tag.

American segregation, mapped day and night

Is segregation in the United States improving? And if it is, what race sees the most people of different races? And do the answers to these questions change based on the time of day? Vox sets out to answer some of these questions through a video essay and an interactive map about segregation in the United States cities at work and at home.

This map shows the population density of Black people living in Champaign-Urbana, IL. The brighter the pink, the higher the percentage of Black people living only near Black people.

This map shows the population density of white people living in Champaign-Urbana, IL. The brighter the pink, the higher the percentage of white people living only near white people.

The map is interesting and effectively demonstrates the continued presence of segregation in communities across the United States. However, there is little detail on the map about the geographical features of the region being examined. This isn’t too much of a problem if you are familiar with the region you are looking at, but for more unfamiliar communities it leads to more questions than it answers.

NASA’s Opportunity Rover Dies on Mars

After 15 years on Mars, the Opportunity Rover Mission was officially declared finished on February 13^th, 2019. The New York Times created a visualization that lets you follow Opportunity’s 28 mile path across the surface of Mars, which includes a bird’s eye view of Oppy’s path as well as images sent by the rover back to NASA. Opportunity was responsible for discovering evidence of drinkable water on Mars.

The map of Opportunity’s path is accompanied by images from the rover and artists’ renderings of the surface of Mars.

The periodic table is a scatterplot. (Among others.)

The periodic table: a data visualization familiar to anyone who has ever set foot in a grade school science classroom. As Lisa Rost points out, the periodic table is actually just a simple scatter plot, with group as the x-axis and period as the y-axis. Or at least, that’s true of the Mendeleev periodic table, the one we are most familiar with. See some other examples of how to break down the periodic table on Rost’s post, which links to the Wikipedia article on alternative periodic tables. If you find a favorite, be sure to tweet it to us @ScholCommons! We are always curious to see what visualizations get people excited.

A periodic table color coded by Lisa Rost to show when in time different elements where discovered.

I hope you enjoyed this data visualization news! If you have any data visualization questions, please feel free to email the Scholarly Commons.