Census Dots

Finally updated for the 2020 Census: Census Dots (1 person = 1 dot)

The MoAT: The Museum of All Things

This is just cool: The MoAT: The Museum of All Things

From the website: The Museum of All Things (or "The MoAT") is a nearly-infinite virtual museum that you can visit for free on your computer! You can find exhibits on millions of topics, from Arts in the Philippines to Zinc deficiency! The breadth of the museum is made possible by downloading text and images from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Every exhibit in the museum corresponds to a Wikipedia article. The walls of the exhibit are covered in images and text from the article, and hallways lead out to other exhibits based on the article's links.

One caveat: you need to actually download the museum software onto your computer:

• https://mayeclair.itch.io/museum-of-all-things (Windows, Mac, OpenXR, etc.)
• https://github.com/m4ym4y/museum-of-all-things (for the nerds)

The Milky Way Map

This is apparently the largest map of the Milky Way: https://archive.eso.org/scienceportal/home. Very cool, but I'm not sure what anyone can do with this...here's a little more beta from Joe Kerski.

The Problem With Bar Charts

Pretty nerdy stuff: The Problem With Bar Charts

Become a data viz SUPERSTAR

This loks promising: Become a data viz SUPERSTAR is a 5-part YouTube series from the folks @ storytelling with data to become, well, a data viz superstar. Could be usefuf for teaching data analysis and data viz.

Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics (2nd Edition)

Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics 2nd Edition is out! The 1st Edition was great so go get the 2nd one.

Color & Contrast

 An interactive guide to color & contrast (by Nate Baldwin) is just that - a comprehensive guide for exploring and learning about the theory, science, and perception of color and contrast. The details get a little wonky, but the section on UI & Data Visualization offers sound practical advice.

Data Science Illustrations by Allison Horst

These are super-cute and very useful for teaching: https://allisonhorst.com/data-science-art

Linear Regression

Linear Regression: A Visual Introduction To (Almost) Everything You Should Know is a great and interactive way to learn, well, about linear regression. It's a little on the stats-nerdy side, but well-done, especially the interactive charts.

Common Sense Education

Common Sense Education is a large non-profit 'dedicated to improving the lives of all kids and families by providing the trustworthy information, education, and independent voice they need to thrive in the 21st century.'

There are lot's of players in that space directly or indirectly promoting some kind of agenda, so be careful! That being said, they seem to offer good educational materials related to digital citizenship and Edtech.

The Memex

In his essay 'As We May Think' (from July 1945!), Vannevar Bush describes a future device called 'the memex' and thereby (conceptually) invented Google and smart gizmos. Here, humans create their own associative joins bewteen items of information to build associative trails that can be shared from one memex to another.

Great read, especially Sections 6 and 7.

Scientific Visualization: Python + Matplotlib

Scientific Visualization: Python + Matplotlib (by Nicolas Rougier) is a free open-source book about, well, scientific data viz using these two tools. Read as a PDF, order a printed copy, and dig around on the GitHub for sources and code examples.

Florence Nightingale's Famous Rose Chart

 

Qualitative Data Viz

Open-ended questions are always tricky to visualize, but Ann K. Emery has some good suggestions here: How to Visualize Qualitative Data with Colored Phrases

The Data Journalism Handbook

The Data Journalism Handbook has been updated: buy the physical copy or get the PDF for free. Awesome.

Colors!

Great advice and discussion by Lisa Charlotte Rost from Datawrapper:

• How to pick more beautiful colors for your data visualizations
• Which color scale to use when visualizing data (4-part series)

Five questions for better data communications

This is a great post: Five questions for better data communications walks you through a data viz process.

 Here's a great quote: I slowly came to realize that I was assigning my audience the tedious task of figuring out for themselves what the takeaways were. My visuals should have been highlighting the interesting things to those seeing them for the first time.

RAWGraphs 2.0

Sounds like RAWGraphs got an update (awesome): https://rawgraphs.io/

The COVID-19 Dashboard

Pretty cool data viz: The COVID-19 Dashboard (by informationisbeautiful.net). I like the five side-by-side charts comparing different countries. Obviously, these are absolute values and therefore the larger countries should always stand-out.

Decolonizing Data Viz

Good article by Stephanie Evergreen: Decolonizing Data Viz. Read and then move-on to Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein.