AI & Data Viz

How can we use AI as a collaborator for data viz? The folks over at SWD have a nice selection of videos and practical tutorials on how to collaborate with AI in the data viz / data storytelling process: https://www.storytellingwithdata.com/ai-data-storytelling

Letters From The Earth

Cool project & something that I have been thinking about: sure, we have plenty of data & facts, but now can those be made a) meaningful to b) promote reasonable actions?

Letters From The Earth uses AI to translate 'boring' data into expressive text = If the Earth could describe its own day using the same signals we collect about it, what would it say?

Their Core Hypothesis: Data contains expressive qualities beyond analytics, and AI can translate those qualities into new modalities that invite more people to participate in understanding and meaning.

Cloud Optimized Data Formats

Cloud Optimized Data Formats is about as boring as it gets...but not when they are explained in a fun zine-comic book! Here's the link: Optimizing Geospatial for the Cloud

EMBER

EMBER offers great data and nice visual data explorers for all kinds of domestic and international energt data. The data are available for download as CSVs and the interactive charts as PNGs and the data for each chart as CSVs as well = great!

• US Electricity Data Explorer
• Electricity Data Explorer (international)

The Cost Of Living

Excellent data set & web map from the Economic Policy Institute: The Family Budget Map. This map shows (by county) the cost-of-living for a 'normal' two-parent, two-child family broken down into housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, taxes, and other necessities.

Even better: the data are accessible as MS Excel!

The Periodic Table Of Data Viz

Pretty cool, but uesless: https://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

Future Climate Projections & The Living Atlas

Good information here: New Authoritative Climate Projections for the United States. Here are the data sets directly:

• Original gridded data
• Data summarized by geograhy

Chart Makers

Here are three options:

• RAWGraphs
• Chartbuilder
• Infogram

As always: user beware! Some of these 'free' ones / tiers can suddenly disappear or turn commerical.

2020 & 2024 Election Results

Amazing data for all 435 congressional districts going back to 2008!

• https://www.the-downballot.com/p/the-downballots-calculations-of-presidential
• As a spreadsheet.

Big Data

What is Big Data? Here is a nice & practical 'definition': Big data is a dataset that is too big to be processed using MS Excel. The term 'big' can mean a variety of things: size/volume (of course),  but also update frequency (real-time maybe), containing a variety of data types, and dimensionality.

NetCDF in ArcGIS Pro

I always wanted to try this: Explore a NetCDF file

An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2024 Election

An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2024 Election by the NYT shows the 2024 election results down to the precint level & the data are available as well!

The Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas

The Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas is awesome - have a look! You can display measurements, reanalysis, and model data at all kinds of geographies & time scales. And: download the data in a bunch of formats.

It is just too much...nobody will use it. Expert scientists will access the data directly and the general public will scared off by the complexity. This is really designed for the rare 'regular' person who is interested & competent enough to figure-out the tool.

Suggestion: Make a simplified version or walk-through video.

Overture Maps Explorer (Beta)

I really don't know much about it, but the Overture Maps Explorer (Beta) apparently lets you zoom-into any location on Earth & then download a bunch of map data.

More over @ Maps Mania: Free Map Data Grabbers

Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas

Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas visualizes Manhattan’s and Brooklyn’s transformations during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Drawing on 1850, 1880, and 1910 census data, it shows how migration, residential, and occupational patterns shaped the city.

Awesome!

Color Buddy

Color Buddy looks a little complicated, but may help you build better color palettes for use in data viz.

Rowboat

Rowboat is a tool to quickly explore massive data tables (CSV or MS Excel) in your browser window. Sounds a little niche, but whatever works!

Five ways to improve your chart axes

Five ways to improve your chart axes is not particularly new or original, but the R crowd will appreciate the code examples provided.

Data GIF Maker

Cool: the Data GIF Maker (by Google) is a super-simple animated GIF maker for data / charts.

NASA Earthdata

NASA Earthdata appears to be the (new) data portal for accessing all kinds of NASA data.

• NASA Worldview offers full-resolution, global satellite imagery from over 1000 data products from NASA’s Land, Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for EO (LANCE) and other NASA data providers.
• NASA Earthdata Search gives access to everything.