Tag: data visualization
How The Pudding visualized the structure of Ali Wong’s stand-up comedy
Stand-up comedy is evolving. The top specials of recent years — Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, Hasan Minhaj’s Homecoming King, James Acaster’s Repertoire, to name a few — are distinct from traditional […]
How we plotted 17,000 data points in 3D to explore police use of force in New Jersey
Last November, I pushed my first commit to Github having no idea what I was in for: creating visualizations with more than 17,000 data points representing police officers who had […]
How to map point data and polygon shapefiles in R
I recently published a series of interactive maps for Beeradvocate magazine that explored storm surge scenarios and low-lying breweries in Boston, New York City, Charleston and Miami. Here’s Boston: This […]
Takeaways on data storytelling from the 2018 Tapestry Conference
The Tapestry Conference, an interactive online data storytelling event, was held last week for the 6th time at the University of Miami in Florida. Sponsored by Miami’s School of Communication […]
How PolicyMap is setting the standard for mapping data
Trying to create data maps can be frustrating and expensive, especially when you’re managing overwhelming amounts of data in a simple visual way. Maggie McCullough felt that there should be […]
“The Immigration Experience” humanizes the history of immigration law. Here’s how.
After the Great Famine, you leave Ireland for America. When anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant sentiment peaks in Boston, do you stay or move to Lowell? Or maybe your parents bring you from […]
Some not-so-obvious ways to represent voter turnout data
With voter registration deadlines fast approaching – and some already past – social media has been filled with reminders urging those who are eligible to register and to make sure […]
How data helped visualize the family separation crisis
Early this summer, at the height of the family separation crisis – where children were being forcibly separated from their parents at our nation’s border – a team of scholars […]
Using French wine reviews to understand TF-IDF, a measure of how unique a word is to a document
“The heady scent of grapefruit and tangelo peel immediately add savoriness to the crisp green-apple fruit that is evident on the nose. But there are also richer hints of honey […]
How to build an animated map of tweets about the NBA finals in R
After beating the Cleveland Cavaliers in four games, the Golden State Warriors have won the 2018 NBA finals. We decided to build an animated map of Twitter mentions of #DubNation […]
How I created Accio Data, a data-driven visual guide to all things Harry Potter
The wizarding world created by J.K. Rowling is full of complex characters, magic, creatures, adventures and more. I grew up having the stories read to me, reading them myself countless […]
How to plot state-by-state data on a map of the U.S. in R
While I usually turn to Carto.com or Datawrapper.de for my mapping needs, I decided to give R a whirl. The following tutorial will take craft beer awards data from Great […]
Six visualizations that explore the extent of overfishing around the world
The global demand for fish is suffocating our oceans. More than 55 percent of the seawater that covers this planet is trawled or lined with hooks in some manner, and […]
How The Pudding structures stories as visual essays
“We don’t tell 10,000-word stories like the New Yorker,” says Russell Goldenberg, one of the four minds behind the visual storytelling site The Pudding. “We try to examine complex topics […]
Getting started with stringr for textual analysis in R
Manipulating characters – a.k.a. non-numerical data – is an essential skill for anyone looking to visualize or analyze text data. This tutorial will go over a few of the base […]
How PRI’s The World conveyed the death toll of mass shootings using sound
Last November, following two of the deadliest mass shootings in American history, PRI’s The World produced a special on global gun culture titled “How other countries can help us understand […]
Ten visualizations that tell the story of the 2018 Winter Olympics
For most of February, around 3,000 athletes from 92 countries are competing in Pyeongchang, South Korea in the 2018 Winter Olympic Games. Over the course of the 17 days, there […]
How The Pudding discovered swing states will suffer most from job automation
Will robots take your job one day? Probably. But how should that affect your choices in the voting booth? Ilia Blinderman, a data journalist at The Pudding, recently published an […]
What can data visualization learn from feminism?
It’s about time to infuse feminism into data science and visualization. At least, that’s what Emerson data visualization and civic tech professor Catherine D’Ignazio says based on her research into […]
How NASA Earth Observatory creates stunning maps to tell technical stories visually
At the heart of any finding by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is a massive amount of data. Its fleet of satellites collect datasets so large they can be hard […]
Meet the Media Innovation student who builds Boston Globe data stories
Growing up in an “underdeveloped suburb” in China’s Hebei Province, Yan Wu pored over every page of the newspapers that her father took home from work. Wu’s family couldn’t afford […]
How to build an interactive county-level map in Tableau
Last year, to explore the impact the opioids crisis is having on the United States, The New York Times visualized overdose deaths by county. Storybench published a tutorial for creating […]
Six ways Alberto Cairo thinks you can improve your data visualizations
There’s a pesky little number that many in the data visualization community would just as soon ignore – one-third of Americans can’t properly read a scatter plot. Newsrooms and other […]
Catching up with Tableau’s Midori Ng about data visualization, finding inspiration and combating fake news
Representatives from data visualization company Tableau recently held a workshop at Northeastern University to walk students through simple charting, mapping and interactivity with the program. Midori Ng, academic programs coordinator […]
How to do basic distance analysis in Carto using polling locations and Dunkin’ Donuts stores
On Tuesday, Bostonians will head to the polls to vote in a mayoral race that has people talking about Tito Jackson’s chances of unseating Marty Walsh. Polls open at 7:00AM and […]
How one data-driven art and technology company is understanding cities with AI
Should New York have more than five boroughs? Are zip codes too large? As part of the Northeastern University Visualization Consortium‘s Fall 2017 speaker series, Mahir Yavuz spoke about Topos, the data-driven […]
What improv comedy can teach us about visualizing data
While storytelling can take on many forms and span several disciplines, the techniques and methods we use to tell good stories are fairly similar. Understanding those similarities and what makes […]
How to build a map and use filters in Tableau Public
A number of publications and organizations have created impressive interactive visualizations pertaining to gun violence in America. From Slate’s 2016 “How many people have been shot in your neighborhood this […]
How the Tampa Bay Times visualized the racial breakdown of police shootings in Florida
Earlier this year, Neil Bedi, a reporter and developer on the Tampa Bay Times’ data and investigations team, produced “If You’re Black,” an interactive story exploring more than 800 officer-involved […]
Getting started with data visualization in R using ggplot2
Creating a customized graph that communicates your ideas effectively can be challenging. This tutorial will introduce you to the popular R package ggplot2, its underlying grammar of graphics, and show […]