Data Voyager

Data Voyager seems like the open-source version of Tableau.

• Data Voyager (load a data set)
• Data Voyager (example)
• Data Voyager demo (starts @ 15:50 minutes)

Constructing Charts and Graphs

Urban Growth of New Delhi

Nice satellite image comparison (1989 to 2018) from NASA: Urban Growth of New Delhi.

Morph

Morph sounds fun: a tool to generate abstract images from data. More about it on FlowingData.

Social Connectedness via Facebook

This has been all over the news: How Connected Is Your Community to Everywhere Else in America? by the Upshot at the NYT. That's basically the interactive data viz to the paper by Bailey et al. (2018) Social Connectedness: Measurement, Determinants, and Effects.

The basic results are very interesting, yet not all that surprising.

Figure 2, to me, is most interesting - mapping 20 'communities' across the USA based on their social connectedness on Facebook. I wonder how these intersect with the idea of mega-regions across the USA, for example The New Map for America (Parag Khanna, NYT, 15 April 2016).

100 Color Palettes

Well-done in Tableau: 100 Color Palettes.

Timeline of Earth

Timeline of Earth is fun - just scroll and scroll and travel from 4.6 billions years ago to today.

Your maps are not lying to you

Your maps are not lying to you is a nice discussion of the fundamental dilemma of map-making: how to portray something huge, complex, and 3-D (the earth) as something much smaller, simpler, and 2-D (the map). Here's a nice and simple illustration of this problem:

https://twitter.com/mjfoster83

Note-Taking Matters

We all know that, but Note-taking: A Research Roundup offers a nice and concise 'meta-analysis'. Plus: Sketchnoting.

The Geography of Facebook

The NYT mapped - in essence - how likely it is that you will be Facebook friends with somebody in a different county in the USA. And - in essence - people tend to be Facebook friends with people who (already) live close-by. Read more about it here.

Living Map

Living Map is a startup company to make it easier for people to navigate complex places.

• Read about here: Meet Living Map
• Example: The Met
• Example: This is Cleveland

DRAW

DRAW stands for 'Data Rescue: Archival and Weather', allows volunteers to participate in the transcription of historical weather logs captured at the McGill weather observatory since 1863. The weather information contained in these logs needs to be transcribed in a digital format in order to be used for scientific research.

Studying Up on Higher Education

Global Land Change (1982 to 2016)

Two recent papers in Nature quantified global land surface changes between 1982 and 2016.

Keenan and Riley (2018): Greening of the land surface.

That's nothing new - green vegetation has increased over the past decades due to (primarily) CO2 increases. In addition, global warming has led to a decline in temperature limitations and thus cold regions has experienced rapid increases in green vegetation.

Song et al. (2018): Land change.

Overall we see less bare ground and more vegetation and that is consistent with the overall greening trend.

• Net loss of forest in the tropics, net gain of forest in the extra tropics for a net overall gain in forest.
• Deforestation in the tropics due to agriculture expansion. The three countries with the largest forest loss: Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay.
• Forest / woody vegetation expansion in cold regions (Siberia, Quebec, etc.) and other places due to locally increases in precipitation and CO2 fertilization.
• Bare ground cover has decreased, primarily due to agriculture, resource extraction, and urban sprawl. However, bare ground has increased due to land degradation in arid and semi-arid parts of the world.

See How Well You Can Draw All 50 States

Silly, but fun: Quiz: See How Well You Can Draw All 50 States

'Mapping' Global Warming

Here's a nice 'map' of temperature anomalies by country from 1880 through 2017 (The Washington Post): Temperature anomalies from the past 137 years

Contemporary Global Warming placed in geological context

Read more about this visualization here: Contemporary Global Warming placed in geological context

Climate change is local

There are a bunch of nice interactive / animated visualization available that let you 'see' climate change right where you live, for example:

• How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born? (NYT)
• 1001 Blistering Future Summers (Climate Central)
• Winter Loses Its Cool (Climate Central)
• The Climate Explorer (as a website, NOAA)
• The Climate Explorer (as an Esri Story Map, NOAA)

Wind Data

Here are two sources for wind data:

• Wind Energy Maps and Data by WINDExchange (Energy.gov). I can see the maps, not entirely sure about the data.
• GIS layers for state maps (US EIA).