Subject
67 entries
Data Visualization
Bookmarks
WhyThere: data-driven city comparison for relocation
WhyThere is a data-driven city comparison tool for relocation decisions — side-by-side high-density visualizations of weather, cost, sunlight, and proximity to nature across cities. Factual rather than subjective.
Visualizing all books in ISBN-space
A GPU-accelerated interactive map of all ~2 billion ISBN numbers, using a custom Bookshelf-Curve algorithm that preserves ISBN decimal structure better than Hilbert curves. Shows publication dates, publishers, and availability across hierarchically-loaded map tiles.
pygwalker: Pandas DataFrame to Tableau-Style UI
pygwalker turns a pandas DataFrame into a drag-and-drop Tableau-style visual analysis interface inside Jupyter notebooks — one line of code to replace writing matplotlib/seaborn boilerplate with interactive visual exploration. Strong tool for exploratory data analysis.
Goldilocks Zone Finder
Goldilocks Zone Finder is a climate analysis tool that shows monthly temperature ranges for locations — helping you find places that are 'just right' year-round. Useful for digital nomads, remote workers, or anyone researching climate before relocating.
R2D3: Visual Introduction to Machine Learning
R2D3 is a visual introduction to machine learning and statistics — scrollytelling essays that use animated D3.js visualizations to explain concepts like decision trees, bias-variance tradeoff, and model comparison. One of the best examples of the genre.
Tufte CSS
Tufte CSS brings Edward Tufte's book typography principles to the web — wide margins for sidenotes, clean serif typography, and minimal chrome. A CSS library for anyone who wants their web writing to read like a well-designed book.
What Do Data Visualizations Look Like As Food?
A dinner party where data visualizations were served as edible food — a conceptual art project probing what happens when you make abstract data tangible and consumable in the most literal sense. An interesting edge case in the 'embodied cognition' design space.
Using Data to Show Product Integrations (Interactive)
Ryan Orban's Galvanize blog post introducing an interactive D3 visualization of SaaS product integrations — using network graph structure to show which tools companies use together. An early example of using graph visualization for product market analysis.
Every Shot Golden State Made in the 2014-15 Season
Kirk Goldsberry's shot chart of every Golden State Warriors make in the 2014-15 championship season — a data visualization that became iconic during the peak of the analytics-in-basketball era.
Visualizing High-Dimensional Data in the Browser with SVD, t-SNE and Three.js
Datacratic's exploration of rendering high-dimensional data in the browser using SVD and t-SNE for dimensionality reduction and Three.js for 3D visualization. An early example of interactive ML visualization before dedicated tools like TensorBoard existed.
Seaborn — Plotting Distributions Notebook
Seaborn's official distribution-plotting example notebook — demonstrates the library's statistical visualization API for histograms, KDE plots, rug plots, and joint distributions. The reference for anyone learning to visualize data distributions in Python.
Zipfian Academy Data Visualization Course on Udacity
Zipfian Academy's data visualization course launched on Udacity in November 2014 — a free MOOC teaching D3.js-based graphics. Part of Zipfian's effort to democratize its curriculum beyond the in-person bootcamp.
"Data Visualization Be Like" — Rachel Binx Tweet
Rachel Binx's 'data visualization be like' tweet — a humorous jab at data viz complexity or pretension, circulated in the data science Twitter community in mid-2014.
Interactive Data Visualization with D3.js — Zipfian Academy
Zipfian Academy's workshop on interactive data visualization with D3.js, taught by Rachel Binx — part of Zipfian's expansion beyond the main cohort into standalone workshops. D3.js was the dominant library for browser-based custom data visualization at the time.
Spurious Correlations
Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations site generates charts showing absurd correlations between unrelated variables — US cheese consumption vs. deaths by bedsheet tangling, etc. The clearest possible demonstration that correlation does not imply causation.
Visage: A Visualization Tool that Democratizes Good Design
Visage is a data visualization tool from 2014 designed to let non-designers create professional-quality charts and infographics without design expertise. It reflects the era's push to democratize data presentation beyond Excel and static image tools.
C3.js — D3-Based Reusable Chart Library
C3.js is a reusable chart library built on top of D3.js that provides a higher-level API for common chart types. It removes the need to write D3 directly while still exposing D3 objects for customization.
Up and Down PyData 2014 — Rob Story
Rob Story's PyData SV 2014 talk notebook on 'Up and Down' — covering the landscape of Python data visualization tools from low-level (Matplotlib) to high-level (Bokeh, Vincent, Folium). A snapshot of the visualization stack debate of that era.
Fast Interactive Prototyping with D3.js — Part II
Snips' second post on fast interactive prototyping with D3.js — practical techniques for rapidly building interactive data visualizations without getting bogged down in D3's verbose API. Useful for data scientists who want to demo without full front-end engineering.
Strava Global Heatmap
Strava's global heatmap aggregates GPS tracks from millions of runs and rides to show where athletes move around the world — a stunning geographic visualization that also accidentally revealed military base locations. Privacy implications aside, technically a landmark crowdsourced geospatial visualization.
Around the World — CartoDB Map of Zipfian Applicants
A CartoDB map showing the global geographic distribution of Zipfian Academy applicants — a data visualization made by a Zipfian student demonstrating where the data science bootcamp was drawing interest from worldwide.
Where Humans Reside in Canada
Amazing Maps tweet showing where humans actually reside in Canada — a geographic visualization demonstrating how the vast majority of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border.
Voronoi Diagram of the World's Airports
Jason Davies' interactive Voronoi diagram of the world's airports — a D3.js visualization showing the nearest-airport region for every point on Earth. Technically elegant and a canonical example of geographic Voronoi tessellation.
Voronoi Airports — Tweet Share
Tweet by @lemonodor sharing Jason Davies' Voronoi diagram of world airports — the Twitter share that likely led to the bookmark of the original visualization.
The PourOver Book — NYT's In-Browser Filtering Library
PourOver is an NYT-open-sourced JavaScript library for fast in-browser filtering and sorting of large collections. Built for news apps that need to let users slice thousands of items without server round-trips.
The Data Visualisation Catalogue
Severino Ribecca's Data Visualisation Catalogue — a reference library of chart types organized by function, with descriptions of when to use each. The go-to resource for choosing the right chart type for your data and communication goal.
Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters
Pew Research Center's 2014 network analysis of Twitter conversations — classifying discussion patterns into six archetypes (polarized crowds, tight crowds, brand clusters, community clusters, broadcast networks, support networks). A rigorous look at how online discourse actually structures itself.
The Bell Curve Scar — Handicapping Passengers on the Unsinkable Ship
A statistical analysis of Titanic passenger survival rates examining how aggregated bell curve thinking obscures survival disparities by class, gender, and ticket price. Uses Titanic as a historical dataset to illustrate how summary statistics can mislead.
Setosa.io: Conditional Probability Visualizer
Victor Powell's interactive visual explanation of conditional probability — part of the setosa.io series that made abstract statistical concepts tangible through browser-based animation. One of the best examples of explanatory visualization for statistics education.
Mesmerizing Maps of Where People Jog: Rich and Poor Neighborhoods
CityLab's analysis of GPS jogging data from running apps revealing that people run primarily within their own neighborhood's economic boundaries — a data-driven illustration of urban spatial segregation. Shows how behavioral GPS data exposes social structure.
Gifpop: Custom GIF Cards for Everyone
Gifpop was a Kickstarter project by Sha Hwang and Rachel Binx turning animated GIFs into lenticular prints — physical cards that animate as you tilt them. A delightful collision of internet culture and traditional print media.
How to Design Useful Monitoring Graphs and Visualizations
A guide to designing useful monitoring graphs and dashboards — distinguishing signal from noise, choosing the right chart type, and setting alert thresholds. The operational side of data visualization that analysis-focused tutorials skip.
D3.js Examples Gallery (christopheviau.com/d3list)
Christophe Viau's curated gallery of D3.js examples — a comprehensive browsable index of D3 visualizations in 2013 when the official documentation lacked a searchable example library. The go-to reference for learning D3 by seeing what was possible.
Why We Hate Infographics (And Why You Should Too)
Qunb's critique of infographics — arguing that most fail because they prioritize visual novelty over clarity, substituting decoration for information. A data visualization purist's case for charts that communicate over charts that impress.
Simpson's Paradox: Interactive Visualization
VUDLab's interactive visualization of Simpson's Paradox — showing how a trend that appears in every subgroup can reverse when the groups are combined. A crucial statistical phenomenon for anyone working with observational data.
Mapping a City's Pulse Using Foursquare and Yelp
Wired Design's piece on Moritz Stefaner's urban data visualizations using Foursquare and Yelp check-in data to map how neighborhoods pulse with activity at different times. An early example of using social location data as a proxy for urban life rhythms.
Yelp Hipster Finder (SF Word Map)
Yelp's word map feature visualizing geographic density of the word 'hipster' in SF business reviews. A small data visualization curiosity that mapped subcultural geography through review language.
Twitter Visualizes Billions of Tweets in Interactive 3D Maps
The Verge's coverage of Twitter's interactive 3D tweet visualization showing billions of geotagged tweets rendered as a globe. An early example of browser-based 3D data visualization at social media scale using WebGL.
Twitter Turns Geotagged Tweets Into Art
The Verge on Twitter's visualization of geotagged tweet density as art — heat maps of global and city-scale tweet volume rendered as luminous data paintings. An early high-profile example of data visualization as an aesthetic object, not just an analytical tool.
Correlations with Tweet Density
Eric Fischer's Flickr set showing correlations between tweet density and other geographic variables across cities. Part of Fischer's influential 'Geotaggers' World Atlas' series exploring what social media geotag data reveals about urban activity and inequality.
User Experience Trends for Admin Dashboards
Speckyboy's roundup of UX trends for admin dashboards in 2013 — covering the shift to data-dense responsive designs, flat UI aesthetics replacing skeuomorphism, and the emerging design language for metrics and analytics interfaces.
Inequality & Mass Transit in the Bay Area
Dan Grover's interactive data visualization showing how transit access in the Bay Area correlates with income and geography — a 2013 example of civic data journalism that made structural inequality legible through maps and charts.
History of San Francisco Place Names
Noah Veltman's interactive map of San Francisco street and place name origins — each name linked to its historical source (a Spanish land grant, a Gold Rush merchant, a city founder). A civic history layer overlaid on the present-day street grid.
HERE IS TODAY
Here Is Today is an interactive scale visualization that places today's date against geological and cosmic timescales — a minimalist but viscerally effective demonstration of how visualization can make abstract quantities comprehensible through progressive context.
How D3 Selections Work
Mike Bostock's definitive explanation of D3's selection model — how data joins, enter/update/exit selections, and subselections actually work under the hood. Essential for anyone who wants to go beyond copying D3 examples to understanding why they work.
How to Tell a Story with Data
HBR guide on turning data analysis into effective narrative — the argument that the audience and the story structure matter as much as the data itself. Focus on the message first, then find the visual that delivers it.
Census Dotmap
Brandon Martin-Anderson's Census Dotmap places one dot per person from the 2010 US Census — a 308 million-dot map that makes population density and racial segregation viscerally visible through visual density alone, without choropleth distortion.
Data as Paint, and the Rise of the Data Artist
SYS-CON piece arguing data is the new paint — that a new class of 'data artists' is emerging who use datasets as creative raw material rather than purely analytical input. An early articulation of data as a creative medium.
Vega — A Visualization Grammar
Vega is a declarative visualization grammar built on D3.js by Trifacta (Jeffrey Heer's group) — JSON specifications describe charts rather than imperative D3 code, making visualizations more composable and shareable. The foundation for what later became Vega-Lite and Altair.
We've Reached Peak Infographic, and We're No Smarter for It
Harvard Business Review's 2013 critique of infographic saturation — the observation that visual data presentation had proliferated faster than information quality, producing a flood of pretty charts conveying little actual insight.
Tributary — What We've Learned from a Year of Live Coding
EJ Fox's retrospective on a year of building Tributary — a live-coding environment for D3.js data visualization. Tributary became an important tool for learning and prototyping D3 through immediate visual feedback.
Data for Dummies: 6 Data Analysis Tools Anyone Can Use
GigaOM's roundup of data analysis tools accessible to non-engineers — covering self-service BI and visualization tools that put analysis in the hands of business users. A 2013 snapshot of the early self-service analytics movement.
10 Tools for Creating Infographics and Visualizations
A roundup of 10 tools for creating infographics and data visualizations in 2013 — covering both no-code tools (Infogr.am, Piktochart) and more sophisticated charting libraries. A snapshot of the early infographic content marketing boom.
Let's Make a Map
Mike Bostock's tutorial on building geographic maps with D3.js and TopoJSON — from raw Natural Earth shapefiles to rendered SVG maps. The canonical reference for browser-based cartography in 2013.
iWantHue — Color Palette Generator
iWantHue generates palettes of maximally distinct colors for data visualization — optimized in HCL color space for perceptual uniformity and colorblind accessibility. The go-to tool for assigning categorical colors to data categories.
Tweetping — Real-Time Twitter Visualization
Tweetping visualized the Twitter streaming API as a real-time pulsing global map — each tweet a dot appearing at its geolocation. A landmark example of combining streaming data APIs with real-time browser visualization.
Data-Visualization Firm's New Software Autonomously Finds Abstract Connections
Wired's profile of Ayasdi and its Iris software — a topological data analysis platform that finds abstract structure in high-dimensional data without the analyst specifying what to look for. Raises the question of whether a machine can find connections a human wouldn't have thought to look for.
Pitch Interactive
Pitch Interactive is a data visualization studio based in Oakland — known for their work on drone strike data, network visualizations, and public-interest data journalism. One of the few studios doing both rigorous data work and high-quality visual design.
Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools
Datavisualization.ch's curated selection of data visualization tools — a 2013 reference for the ecosystem of charting libraries, mapping tools, and visualization frameworks available before the current consolidation. A snapshot of what practitioners were using.
Mike Migurski: m.teczno.com
Mike Migurski's personal site — the former Stamen Design technical director who went on to become CTO of Code for America. A key figure in SF data visualization and civic tech in the early 2010s.
Jehiah 12: A Personal Annual Report
Jehiah Czebotar's personal annual data report visualizing a year of self-tracked data — location, activity, sleep, and more. An early example of the personal analytics / quantified self genre applied with real design craft.
Timeline JS — Beautifully Crafted Timelines
Timeline JS by Veríte — an open-source tool for building interactive timelines from a Google Spreadsheet. Widely adopted by journalists and educators in 2012-2014 for its zero-code approach to narrative data visualization.
Top 20 Data Visualisation Tools (2012)
Net magazine's 2012 roundup of the top 20 data visualization tools — a snapshot of the ecosystem just as D3.js was establishing dominance. Covers both code-based libraries and drag-and-drop tools across the complexity spectrum.
Visual.ly Launches Social Network for Data Visualization
Visual.ly launched a social layer for data visualization in 2012, letting creators share and discover infographics. An interesting bet that dataviz had enough creative community to sustain a dedicated platform — ultimately it didn't reach critical mass.
Sourcemap: Where Things Come From
Sourcemap mapped the supply chains of everyday products — tracing where components come from, how they're manufactured, and the carbon footprint of each leg. An early attempt at supply chain transparency as a public tool.
Meshu: Turn Your Places into Beautiful Objects
Meshu turned personal location data from Foursquare and other sources into 3D-printed jewelry using Delaunay triangulation — an early example of mass-customization through algorithmic design and 3D printing.
Android Fragmentation Visualized
OpenSignalMaps visualized the Android device ecosystem by collecting data from 681 distinct Android devices in their user base, showing the extreme hardware and OS version fragmentation developers faced. The visualization became a reference point in iOS-vs-Android developer experience debates.