Real-world Data Visualization Examples

Using video images and expert analysis, Reuters chronicles apparent lapses in Abe’s security and examines the possible motive of a killing that shocked a nation unused to gun crime.-Reuters Graphics

Average drive times in states with bans are over 5.3 hours compared to 30 minutes or less in states where abortion is legal. Household incomes are lower in states with bans as well, meaning the risk of sending families further into poverty is higher when there's an unwanted pregnancy.-CNN

Roughly 33 million women of child-bearing age live in states with existing or expected abortion bans.-Bloomberg

The U.S. is very car-commute-centric, and California is no exception.-Darrell Owens

The data shows how the most extreme migration patterns have already started to reverse, making last year’s dip seem like a pandemic-era blip.-Bloomberg

Timezones have changed throughout history due to inventions like railroads or world crises like war. It’s particularly interesting to see the rise and decline of daylight savings.-Scott Logic

The world produces more food than ever, but the amount of land we use is now falling. This means we can feed more people while restoring wild habitat.-Our World in Data

As happened so many times before, the strong public support for gun control will fade away with our memories of the shootings.-FiveThirtyEight

Many of the states most likely to ban abortion if Roe is overturned tend have a higher-than-average percentage of people living in poverty or without health insurance.-Reuters

Since March 2020, American house prices have risen by 33 percent. But the increase has not been evenly spread. The COVID-19 pandemic, and the lockdowns and restrictions it inspired, have changed where homebuyers want to live.-The Economist

This racial-dot map may be the only one-point one-person map of America at 2020 census. It’s built with Apache Arrow. And it will make your computer fans spin.-Ben Schmidt

Differences between high and low emitters within nations show that globally, the top 1%—located all over the world—actually emit about 70 times as much carbon as the bottom 50%.-Bloomberg

“We looked at 138 formerly redlined cities and found most were still segregated — just like they were designed to be.”-FiveThirtyEight

By 2050, the total land area that’s suitable for growing coffee will likely decrease, with the best places for growing coffee shifting away from the tropics.-National Geographic

This a nice walkthrough of how to make a U.S. state trends map in R from scratch.-Data Stuff

Like Groundhog Day itself, these charts are all in good fun.-FiveThirtyEight

Using data from a quarter-million tweets to turn Wordle into a numbers game, and what it teaches us about the truth.-benn.substack

The demand for labor is way up. And so are the wages.-The Wall Street Journal

How the legacy of former industrial sites pollutes American cities today.-Grist

If you’re not into watching ASMR YouTube videos, you might be surprised by all the different genres and sub-genres highlighted on this map.-Data Stuff

The past two decades have seen some of the most extreme dry periods in U.S. history.-Scientific American

2021 was an extreme year for weather disasters in the U.S.: cold snaps in Texas, scorching heat in the northwest, massive fires, and a string of hurricanes and tornadoes.-The Washington Post

You’ve probably experienced slower delivery times than normal this year (especially as we head into the holidays). This piece offers an excellent illustration of the impact of the global supply chain breakdown.-The Straits Times

This is just some really excellent data journalism at work.-Financial Times

By 2100, the 38 of the world’s 100 biggest cities will be in Africa.-The Washington Post

Why one of the Internet’s oldest images lives on without its subject’s consent.-The Pudding

Each day in 2019, humans destroyed an average of 97 square kilometers of the Earth’s total rainforests.-Reuters Graphics

The UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) begins this week. The world has made some progress on slowing climate change, but not nearly enough.-Quartz Africa

Pick up a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and you’ll be the most popular stop for trick-or-treating in your neighborhood.-FiveThirtyEight

Pop in a few things you’ve written, or text written by your favorite author, and get a cool punctuation visualization in return!-Creators Hub

Right now, your electric vehicle might not be as clean as you thought. But as the world switches to more renewable energy sources, electric vehicle lifecycle emissions are expected to go down by nearly 75 percent.-Financial Times

There’s a startling increase in the number of days folks are breathing in smoke, all across the U.S.-KCRW

This is a really beautiful map. We particularly like watching the snow creep in during the winter and the burst of green in the spring. Best of all, the creator shared a detailed code walkthrough of how she made it.-OneZero

It’s not the word you’d expect—and it appears in this very sentence.-OneZero

“My sense is that we often don’t know what to do with ordinal variables, partly because they don’t fit neatly into traditional analysis routines. Ordinal variables are not numeric, they’re not categorical, they’re strange... [O]rdinal data is also somewhat complicated to visualize whenever there’s any sort of change involved.”-Octavio Medina

Github has a really fun tool—utilizing a circle packing visualization—for understanding different parts of a codebase from a bird’s eye view. Just enter a repository name to get started.-OCTO

Most years, the American Time Use Survey reflects the ways in which changes in technology, society, and the economy subtly shift how we spend our days. For 2020, it reflected the sudden rupture of daily life.-The New York Times

Complaints filed against police officers by the public are often the first and only warning sign that a cop might be on a course of escalating violence. This network analysis highlights officers with the most complaints against them.-Gothamist

Ah, the table—the backbone of data analysis—often overlooked for flashier charts. This nice list of R packages gives you options for building these stalwart presenters of data.-R for the Rest of Us

This tool helps generate palettes suited for UI Design, where most of the time you need to work with a few base colors and a whole range of different variations and shades.-Gabriel Adorf

New York City’s MTA and the Bay Area’s BART dropped to 20% of their normal ridership during the pandemic.-Youyang Gu

Ready for a new look? This analysis will teach you how to stand out on the timeline.-benn.substack

Instead of the FCC’s data, we drew on an anonymized dataset collected by Microsoft through its cloud services network... for better or worse, these are the speeds users actually experience, which puts the dataset worlds ahead of what you’d get from the FCC.”-The Verge

How much does availability to play matter when it comes to the NBA MVP race?-The F5

A better name for the phenomenon would be “urban shuffle.” 84 percent of folks who moved remained within the same metro area.-Bloomberg CityLab

There have been only three days in 2021 when police officers did not kill someone in the U.S.-Mapping Police Violence

“Incan people developed the khipu, a data management system. They used the khipu to track census, military, and calendar data, and were doing so in the 1100s, long before Florence Nightingale or Joseph Priestly.”-Data Literacy

In 2020, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 Americans, more than any other year in at least two decades.-The Washington Post

How much is Daylight Savings Time the bane of your existence? Choose your ideal sunset and sunrise times and find out.-Andy Woodruff

Here’s a plot of minimum wage by state, from 1968 to now. Some states went up, some follow the federal minimum, and others don't budge.-FlowingData

People did flee the Bay during the pandemic, but mostly they just fled to... other parts of California.-San Francisco Chronicle

There’s more TV than ever, and we have more time to watch it (thanks to COVID-19). This data study tells you how the quality of a series dips and rises over time, before you commit hours to binging it.-Cédric Scherer

A dashboard that no one ever looks at is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. Get some concrete tips for making sure your dashboards meet your users’ needs every time.-Shopify Engineering

In today’s world, children are surrounded by graphs. But that constant exposure doesn’t equal understanding. Here’s some advice for helping the kids in your life become data literate, as early as possible!-Nightingale

Our favorite non-English names for pie chart include: camembert (French), ceremonial bread (Bulgarian), and cheese portions graphic (Catalan).-Eric Hittinger

Add Grumpy Cat, Lil Bub, or Pusheen to your charts!-R Coder

“A middle-of-the-pack Senator in 1947 was maybe 55 or 56-ish years old. Now, the middle seems to be 65 or 66, a whole decade older!”-wcd.fyi

Haven’t gotten enough of marveling at Michelle Obama’s inauguration outfit? Use that gorgeous saturated red in your next data viz.-Cianna Bedford-Petersen

These well-annotated charts are great examples of how to tell a story with data—in this case, the frightening upswing of the climate crisis.-Bloomberg

The best visual and data-driven stories of 2020.-The Pudding

You’ve seen your Spotify Wrapped. Now have a pretentious AI insult your taste in music.-The Pudding

If you attend a small dinner party in Los Angeles, how many people there are likely to be infected with COVID-19? What about a wedding in South Dakota? A 20-person meeting in Pittsburgh?-COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool

If you’ve been wondering when your ballot will actually get counted (or your family’s or friends’ ballots in another state!), The Times has you covered with this data viz.-The New York Times

An analysis of 41,662 social media posts shows how the Plandemic video spread misinformation about COVID-19 around the globe.-Stanford Internet Observatory

A fun data exploration of 98 ice cream flavors available around the world.-Hesham Eissa & Lindsey Poulter

Even with steady growth from 2009 until the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, many of the disparities between people of color and white people are wider than they were 10, 20, or even 30 years ago.-The Atlantic

What makes for an ideal high school play? According to this data deep dive: a big cast, lots of female roles, and subject matter that won’t scare your grandma.-NPR

This map of 5,300 data points shows 12 types of surveillance deployed by law enforcement, including license plate readers, facial recognition, cell-site simulators, drones, and Amazon’s Ring video-sharing partnerships with local law enforcement.-Electronic Frontier Foundation

Social signals are in fact a factor when reviewing a pull request, even when programmers don’t think they are.-Fordable

Racial inequality is stark in unemployment rates, in homeownership rates, in life expectancy at birth.-The New York Times

“If they had died of COVID-19 at the same rate as White Americans, at least 14,400 Black Americans, 1,200 Latino Americans and 200 Indigenous Americans would still be alive.”-APM Research Lab

As COVID-19 caused many people to start working from home, we observed an interesting trend: a steep decline in the rate of web traffic to our site from people using the Internet Explorer web browser.-Mode Blog

The cost of solar is plunging faster than anyone could have predicted. Let’s go deep into the past decade of data and forecast what comes next.-Ramez Naam

Going for a quarantine stroll in New York isn’t just tricky because of population density—many sidewalks are simply too narrow to properly social distance.-Meli Harvey

A collection of COVID-19 line charts that went haywire: oil prices, the Dow, unemployment, search terms, seismic noise, restaurant bookings, and more.-Ben Jones

What changes each decade, what stays the same, and what do the questions say about American culture and society?-The Pudding

Here’s how slowing the spread of infections over a longer period of time, like 18 months instead of six, will impact America’s healthcare system.-ProPublica

Two professors work to better visualize probability for the next U.S. presidential election.-Northwestern Magazine

Get a window seat... and stay there.-National Geographic

Where in the world are all the electrical power lines?-Nature (https://www.nature.com/)

Data visualization became an integral part of modern culture last year, permeating our clothes, our books, and U.S. politics.-Nightingale

How does the country compare to 10 years ago?-Pew Research Center

Get a look at the evolution of the JavaScript ecosystem, based on results from a survey of 21,717 developers (beautifully visualized, of course!).-State of JavaScript

In a crowded field of candidates, how might support consolidate among front-runners?-Swayable

This one’s just plain fun to look at. Top summer blockbusters are reimagined visually as flowers, using data about the movie (like genre and rating) to inform the shape, color, and petal type.-Shirley Wu

The classic buffet line system is deeply flawed and inefficient. There’s got to be a better way.-Erik Bernhardsson

There are a lot of reasons that a country could be “good” or “bad.” This visual exploration creates “axes of goodness” in an attempt to combine the metrics we regularly use to rank countries.-Amelia Wattenberger

Leaf peepers, listen up!-The Washington Post

The Guardian has conducted the first detailed analysis of America’s homeless relocation programs, compiling a database of around 34,240 journeys and analyzing their effect on cities and people.-The Guardian

A fascinating look at the types of street litter and why some blocks are “trashier” than others.-Rubbish

Lessons and ideas from ten years of helping people design and make data sculptures.-Rahul Bhargava

When’s the best time to pitch a tent at Yosemite or Yellowstone? This look at overnight stays at US national parks has you covered—and it’s a beautiful example of small multiples, to boot!-Jordan Vincent

Get ready for the nostalgia. Our favorite insight from this analysis: “Bob Ross always loved trees, but fell out of love with clouds.”-Hooked on Data

Sound on. Earbuds in.-The Pudding

What are hackers working on these days? Every year there’s a spike in security questions on Stack Overflow as the DEF CON hacker convention kicks off in Las Vegas.-Stack Overflow

For 50 years, 3% of the world’s population has been migrants, but the patterns of emigration and immigration vary widely from country to country.-National Geographic

When she was faced with the prospect of quitting her podcast due to time constraints, this data analyst reviewed and visualized top podcasts to discover the patterns that make for an interesting audio story.-Podcast Movement

“There's a community for almost anything on Reddit. If every community was like a star in the sky, what would the universe of Reddit communities look like? And where are you in it?”-Computer Science, University of Toronto

A nice visual exploration of the slow—and then sudden—decline of basketball players shooting from the “mid-range” part of the court. It's all about 3-pointers now, baby.-Flowing Data

How the United States generated electricity from 2001 to 2017.-The New York Times

If your relatives still haven’t left yet, maybe playing these songs on repeat will get them out the door.-Haystacks

ESPN’s Outside the Lines reviewed food-safety inspection reports for all 111 North American pro sports venues. Find your stadium and see how it fared.-ESPN

This map displays crops on 57 million fields in the U.S. and Europe using open satellite imagery and AI. Clicking the “Random beautiful fields” button has the same soothing effect as looking out a plane window when you're flying over the countryside.-OneSoil

How do the email messages from each U.S. Senate campaign during the 2018 election cycle differ by party? One surprising discovery: the sentiment scores across both Democratic and Republican campaigns are pretty similar.-Graham Tierney

Why do recent World Chess Championship games appear to be less exciting than in the past? This analysis of 82,000 WCC moves shows how the game has changed over time.-Mode

NPR mapped which things Republican and Democratic districts have in common (craft breweries, museums, and Amtrak). This post dives into the process behind that project.-NPR Visuals Team

This analysis of 3 million election ads for 2018 congressional and gubernatorial races found the most commonly discussed issue in 210 local television markets. Maps abound.-Bloomberg

The CDC’s report of a steady increase in nonfatal gun injuries is out of step with a downward trend shown in data from multiple independent public health and criminal justice databases. Since many journalists and researchers rely on CDC numbers, the uncertainty of the data has serious implications for the national-level understanding of gun violence.-FiveThirtyEight

In an age where we talk about political and ideological divides, our social bubbles are defined by something much simpler: distance.-The Upshot

An enlightening walk-through of visualizing toxicity and Twitter threads as “withered trees” using 3D computer graphics software Houdini.-Cortico

Across most of California, human activities and infrastructure—like campfires, arson, electrical equipment, and power line—start the vast majority of fires.-BuzzFeed News

Women have known for decades that their jean pockets are woefully inept at their primary function: to carry things. Now we have the data to prove it.-The Pudding

Unsurprisingly, how people voted mostly lines up with population density. But there are some unexpected voting enclaves to explore: Trump precincts in the middle of urban centers, blue Clinton pockets in overwhelmingly red states.-The New York Times

“People see maps of any type, and particularly election maps, as the result, the outcome, but there are so many different types of maps available that can portray results in shades of the truth.”-Wired

“Overall, 255,000 Americans 85 years old or older were working over the past 12 months. That’s 4.4 percent of Americans that age, up from 2.6 percent in 2006, before the recession.”-Wonkblog

Here’s just one tidbit from this incredible feat of data journalism: “Almost a quarter of French respondents, as well as nearly one in five Swedes and about one in seven Americans, think the average immigrant gets twice as much government aid as native residents do. In no country is this true.”-The New York Times

The next time you bust out your Wii or Nintendo Switch, you’ll know which character/kart/tire configurations will get you across finish line first.-Civis Analytics

These charts reveal that the advantage remote workers have over non-remote workers isn't more free time, but more flexibility.-FlowingData

At least 404 terrestrial volcanoes have erupted since 1883—the year of Krakatoa's historic eruption. Nearly 200 of these eruptions have occurred since the year 2000.-Axios

In 1991, it took fewer than 100 girl’s names to make up more than 80% of all common names given to girls. Today, it takes over 250. But that doesn’t mean parents are getting more creative and individualistic.-Quartz

For years, overcrowding was incorrectly blamed for being the root cause of delays on the NYC subway, but ridership actually stayed mostly flat from 2013 to 2018. This simulation of a line of subway trains moving as minutes pass illustrates how these slowdowns led to the current crisis.-The New York Times

Unlike most stand-up, Ali Wong's Baby Cobra adds up into something bigger. She’s telling not just 100 individual jokes, but a story that is deliberately arranged, much like a comedy film or a TV series.-The Pudding

The U.S. military’s Joint Space Operations Center has recorded 15,723 objects in low-Earth orbit—including nearly 13,000 that are classified as space debris.-Axios

Everyone should be taking notes from The Pudding when it comes to creating focused data exploration experiences.-The Pudding

This year, Stack Overflow collected responses from more than 100,000 developers. One of the most notable discoveries concerns ethics: “Developers are not sure how they would report ethical problems, and have differing ideas about who ultimately is responsible for unethical code.”-Stack Overflow

Explore the origins of some of today's most used chart-types, from choropleth maps to venn diagrams. (And if you want to learn how this infographic of infographics was made, check out this post.)-info we trust

Hurricane Maria sent thousands fleeing devastation in Puerto Rico. Federal data obtained by CNN suggest migrants have moved to every US state—even Alaska.-CNN

The next time a restaurant greeter tells you “It’ll be a 5 or 10 minute wait,” pull up this interactive simulation. (Seriously, what would we do without Nathan Yau?)-FlowingData

It’s worth bubbling this back up in the wake of (yet another) mass shooting.-New York Times

Nothing says “I love you” on Valentine’s Day like a cookie shaped like a probabilistic distribution made with Python and a 3D printer.-Fast Forward Labs

These stunning compilations of video and data visualization make it clear just how much speed U.S. Olympic figure skater Nathan Chen needs to pull off a quad jump or snowboarder Chloe Kimneeds to land back-to-back 1080 spins on the half-pipe.-New York Times

A number of this year’s Oscar nominees are showing in less than 15% of theaters in North America right now. That’s no mistake.-MarketWatch

How the only two words for tea spread around the world offers a clear picture of how globalization worked before “globalization” was a term anybody used.-Quartz

It’s official. JS frameworks are the startups of UI development.-Stack Overflow

This year, most of the top professional sports leagues in North America and Europe will be more international in composition than ever before.-The Upshot

Lists inside a list (inside a dream?—no wait, that’s Inception).-Maarten Lambrechts

This study pitted 50 movies against 12 new ways of measuring Hollywood’s gender imbalance, built on top of original data collected by clipboard-armed FiveThirtyEight staffers.-FiveThirtyEight

Adding a third dimension to your visualizations can help you compare customer success rep performance across multiple metrics.-Mode

Generative music is created by a system to be ever-different and changing. This detailed visual presentation surveys the landscape of systems (including, yep, machine learning) for making such music.-Tero Parviainen

This is a fun one for crossword aficionados. A member of the New York Times Games team created a set of visualizations to examine patterns within all historic puzzles.-r/dataisbeautiful

Worldwide efforts have been focused on limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, but the latest projections point to a 3.2C increase by 2100. These interactive maps explore how sea-level rise will affect the most-impacted cities.-The Guardian

This analysis of over 24,000 episode ratings from 184 television shows proves that Halloween TV episodes aren’t just filler.-Kaylin Walker

Say goodbye to endlessly scrolling through the font menu in your word processor. Instead, use this database of typefaces, classified by characteristics like width, spacing, and stroke contrast.-Florian Schulz

Explore some of the most inspiring and inventive data visualizations of 2017 (and vote for your favorite!).-Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards

If taxis and bikes aren’t your preferred mode of transportation, this analysis of a decade of NYC’s MTA alerts has you covered.-Iterating

The next time you need to commute from Williamsburg to Manhattan, grab your helmet instead of hailing a cab.-Todd W. Schneider

There's finally a way to visually make sense of all those flashbacks and flashforwards in Tarantino and Nolan films.-IEEE

Film studio execs say poor Rotten Tomatoes' reviews are to blame for the summer box office slump. This analysis debunks that myth and surfaces something more profound: “Audience scores and critic scores are increasingly correlated, meaning that audiences are becoming expert at smelling a 'bad' movie and staying away.”-Vantage

If each Lego brick color were a word, which Lego sets would have the most limited or diverse vocabularies? Find out in this analysis, which applies techniques associated with text mining to the color themes of Lego sets.-Nathanael Aff

Elsewhere in the data journalism world, The Pudding continues to kill it. Check out these impactful maps of “abortion deserts” across America.-The Pudding

Speaking of data viz about disasters, Axios has released a chart that clearly renders the history of every Atlantic storm tracked by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration since 1987.-Axios

Place 50 GoT characters on a matrix of morality and physical appearance, and then see how your choices compare to the general consensus.-New York Times

Have this on hand before you submit your next conference proposal.-Dean Attali

Female characters appear in superhero comics less often than males — but when they are included, how are they depicted?-The Pudding

You probably won’t want to set this chart-inspired font to default, but that doesn’t stop it from being a downright delight to look at.-info we trust

“What traits make Austen special, and can they be measured with data? Can literary genius be graphed?” Spoiler: the answer is yes.-New York Times

What happens when you abandon the century-old five borough partitioning of New York City and remap the city to reflect the realities of 2017?-Topos

When you’re trying to understand the relationships in a really big dataset (three-million-grocery-orders big), a 2D scatterplot might not cut it. This immersive 3D visualization technique offers a way to make sense of data with multiple attributes and improve machine learning features and models.-Inside Machine Learning

Data from a recent Stack Overflow survey shows a correlation between developers who use spaces in their code and higher pay. Follow along with this deep data dive, and you’ll discover there’s more to tabs and spaces than first meets the eye.-Evelina Gabasova

This “data explorer” from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority is a great example of visualization in the public sector—and just downright fun to click around. (Plus, check out the entirely open source stack used to build it.)-Hacker Noon

Ever wonder what emoji come before and after the gun emoji? Now you know.-Lexical Items

What would you see if you could stare directly across the ocean, from shore to shore? It’s not always the place you think. Find out with this interactive map, constructed in D3.-Andy Woodruff

In 2015, the MLB introduced a new metric— the “launch angle.” Since then, batters have become obsessed with hitting higher and harder and baseball saw the biggest surge in home runs since the steroids era. Coincidence? Probably not.-Washington Post

A great tutorial for making interactive graphics that’ll dazzle on the web.-Peter Beshai

Convinced Fred Rogers’ favorite color was red? Think again.-The AWL

Has your inspiration dried up? Get those creative juices flowing with work from some the greatest data viz practitioners around.-PolicyViz

A quick scan of these modified Chernoff faces (a visualization technique that maps statistics to facial features) reveals how each state stacks up in terms of uninsured rates, unemployment rates, poverty rates, and more.-Axios

“Each square represents a single day between age 18 to a life expectancy of 78.8 years, or 22,573 days including leap days.”-FlowingData

If only all marital differences could be solved with unbiased experiments and some statistics.-Tyler Morgan-Wall

“People are flying more often, in fuller planes and paying higher fees.” How did we get here?-New York Times

This project offers a visual introduction to probability and statistics. Even if you don't need a primer, this is a great example of what can be accomplished with D3.-Brown University

A by-the-numbers break down of the first seven movies in The Fast and The Furious blockbuster franchise, from “engine revving time” to the number of “Corona sips.”-Bloomberg

How do you get a leg up on the competition in this beloved word game? Insist on playing first.-RPubs

The world of software is an ecosystem, and Slack, GitHub, and Amazon EC2 are right at the center of it.-Stackshare

With global climate talks currently underway in Paris, Storybench has taken a look around the web for some of the most compelling visualizations of climate change data.-Storybench

Each week, the Guardian fixes up two of its readers. Using R, one fan of the column scraped and analyzed the data from hundreds of post-date interviews.-Maëlle Salmon

This analysis of more than 200,000 press releases and Facebook posts from members of the 114th Congress quantifies how often legislators “go negative” in their outreach to the public.-Pew Research Center

And by “Internet,” we mean mostly young, mostly male Reddit users. Search for a word or phrase and see how its popularity has changed over time—from late 2007 through the end of 2016.-FiveThirtyEight

Which languages do people prefer to code in their spare time?-Felipe Hoffa

In the zone. Heads down. Deep work. Whatever you call it, you know that feeling—when you’re intensely focused and everything just flows. One professor analyzed a year’s worth of these sessions. Productivity insights abound.-Enrico Bertini

How one data visualization practitioner balances the art of storytelling with the desire to let folks discover insights on their own.-Questions in Dataviz

If you prefer knock outs to home runs, good news! There’s an entire blog dedicated to Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) analysis. Check out a new way to rank Ultimate Fighting Championship athletes using R.-Fight Prior

America’s cultural divide looks very similar to its political divide. Explore the fissures and points of unity based on the popularity of 50 U.S. TV shows.-The Upshot

How does the most fearsome military force in the galaxy get whittled down from 6.8 million troops to 700k? This chart chronicles the casualties sustained by the Empire, from Rogue One to Return of the Jedi.-FiveThirtyEight

We all have our favorite Skittles flavor (even if it happened to be replaced with Green Apple). But is the distribution of Skittles skewed toward a particular color?-Reddit user zonination

When a series of signal interferences led to massive disruptions on a Singapore subway line, a team of data scientists stepped in to solve the mystery… with Python!-Data.gov.sg

A downright stunning and delicious exploration of the seasonality and popularity of foods, from old favorites, like chili con carne, to obscure ones, like the humble gooseberry. Mouth watering yet?-Google News Lab and Truth & Beauty

By now, we know there are pitfalls to relying on opinion polls to predict elections. So what data might we use instead? This in-depth analysis presents congressional endorsements as another way to forecast results.-Data Driven Journalism

“Back in the good old days…” Were they so good? It all depends on when you are and your criteria for “better.” These charts let you select a year as a point of reference, and see how other years compare in terms of unemployment rate, minimum wage, and more.-FlowingData

Unravel the mysteries of Westworld through data visualization.-Mode

Come for the beautiful video of runners’ paths unfurling through Boston, stay for the explanation of how it was made. Plus, there’s an interesting bit at the end: some thoughts on tackling the problem of sharing fun proprietary data without compromising user privacy.-null

Is a scientific career predictable? Not in the slightest. Turns out, it’s completely random which paper in a scientist’s career becomes the most successful one.-Northeastern University

It feels like every other book on the bestseller list has “girl” in the title. But who are these girls? And why are there so many of them?-FiveThirtyEight

“About one in 10 posts feature an image of the major-party nominees. Trump appears more than twice as often than Clinton. Whether the news media is biased or not as he claims, they certainly love using his mug.”-Polygraph

Turns out critics LOVE Seth Rogen. Who knew?-Priceonomics

In a great example of interactive data journalism, explore how globalization has led to the explosive growth of barriers between countries.-Washington Post

Examine the numbers behind various aspects of marathon performance, including how to avoid hitting the wall, the best indicator of finish time, and how women are more disciplined runners than men.-Running with Data

America’s favorite family has been around for 27 years, providing plenty of data to analyze. Find out who’s the most talkative side character in Springfield, if Homer was always the star, and how much longer the show’s ratings can last.-Todd Schneider

Learn how media outlets use different styles of cartograms to visually represent the state of the race, and explore who the polls predict to win each state with this interactive visualization.-Time Magazine

From chalkboards to 3D holograms, the next time you need some visualization inspiration check out how Hollywood’s best directors use data to tell stories.-Info We Trust

The shortlist for the Kantar Information Is Beautiful Awards has been released, highlighting the best work in data visualization over the past year. Check out the nominees across six different categories, including data journalism, infographics, and interactive visualizations.-Kantar Information Is Beautiful Awards

You may have to rethink why certain actors are in the movies they're in.-Wonkblog

-The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media

This entry looks at the growth of disposable incomes over time.-Our World in Data

“When people say the climate has changed before, these are the kind of changes they’re talking about.”-xkcd

A deep statistical dive into defining songs with attributes—such as tempo, energy, and valence.-Cuepoint

The increasing polarization of the U.S. electorate has made old-fashioned election blowouts essentially impossible. This election cycle demonstrates how changing demographics leave only a few swing states up for grabs.-Guardian

We’ve all heard the horror stories about bicycle accidents on city streets. But if you take into account other dangers like heart disease and air pollution, choosing not to cycle may be far worse for your health.-Financial Times

Trump says crime is up. Obama says it’s down. Most Americans believe crime is worse, but far fewer believe it’s worse where they live. So who’s right? The Marshall Project sliced 40 years of crime data from several angles to find out. The result is a great example of bringing together human perspectives and data to tell a compelling story.-The Marshall Project

The Olympics are over, but we wanted to squeeze in one last data viz from Rio before the long wait ‘til 2020.-New York Times

Facebook recently announced they’ll limit exposure to articles with clickbait headlines in News Feed. Might heuristics and machine learning help separate the wheat from the chaff?-Max Woolf

No, we’re not talking about the green water hullabaloo. This detailed data exploration covers a different issue: Was there a current in the Rio pool affecting swimmers’ speed?-SwimSwam

Soccer and field hockey keepers have the “easiest” jobs, generally saving around 70 percent of shots.-FiveThirtyEight

The American women’s gymnastics team won the gold with 184.897 points, an 8-point lead over second-best Russia.-New York Times

By charting all of Phelps’s individual race times since Sydney, we can see how his performance has changed over the last 16 years-New York Times

For each sport of the 2016 Games, I looked at the median age of the participants — overall, men and women — using data from athlete profile pages on the Rio 2016 website.-FiveThirtyEight

Just 10 countries — the United States, Australia and eight European nations — earned medals in the first modern Games, in Athens in 1896. More than 100 years later, in Rio, there were 87 medal-winning nations, from Algeria to Vietnam.-New York Times

This sentiment analysis of Donald Trump’s went viral went this week. Apparently, tweets from Trump’s Android account are more negative than those from his iPhone account, leading to the conclusion that the iPhone tweets are from Trump’s campaign staff, and the Android tweets are from The Donald himself.-Variance Explained

It’s Day 4 of the Rio 2016 Olympics. If you’re ready to take a break from watching, check out this gallery of cool data viz about the games from the Tableau community.-Tableau

Ever wanted to visualize your team’s Slack communication? Startup Moovel built #teamchatviz to see if their goals for interdisciplinary, company-wide collaboration were playing out in Slack. It’s free and open-source. Try it out with your own Slack data.-Co.Design

Explore this network visualization of the entire Star Trek universe (except for Star Trek: Beyond). Filter by episode, movie, series, or character to see the bonds formed amongst the Starfleet crew. Live long and prosper, folks.-Datascope Analytics

Since the beginning of 2015, the Middle East, Africa and Asia have seen nearly 50 times more deaths from terrorism than Europe and the Americas.-Washington Post

An analysis of how the color, size, and connectivity of Lego sets have changed over the years.-Mode

54% percent of U.S. households fit the nuclear family model, but that other 46% leaves room for a lot of variety. Explore a diverse group of family structures in this visualization.-FlowingData

Ever seen this message at the bottom of an Amazon review and raised an eyebrow?: 'I received this product for free or at a discount in exchange for my honest, unbiased review.' Sure, these folks claim to be impartial, but are they really? The data says no.-ReviewMeta

How are disco and post-punk music related? Where did dubstep even come from? This interactive network visualization traces the genealogy and history of popular music genres since 1880. Make sure to zoom in—there’s a lot to explore here.-Musicmap

A stunning visual exploration of five year’s worth of data on U.S. drought—and a peek into the process of mapmaking.-Adventures in Mapping

Alton Sterling's and Philando Castile's deaths have driven renewed attention to the more than 1,000 people killed each year by police officers.-FiveThirtyEight

This database is based on news reports, public records, social media and other sources.-Washington Post

For all you physics folks: a map of questions from the frontier of fundamental physics, weighted by their importance in advancing the field. For all you data viz folks: an interactive experience you can’t miss.-Quanta Magazine

Scientists at the Computational Story Lab performed sentiment analysis on over 1,700 English language works of fiction to identify the fundamental shapes stories can take. They also found out which of these arcs make for the most popular narratives.-MIT Technology Review

One man’s quest to discover 'the exact time of day in which brunch maximally occurs' using Twitter data. Bonus for you Python users out there: this analysis includes some beautiful charts made with pandas and matplotlib.-The Startup

Investors, policy makers and countries face a messy breakup with vast financial, economic and political implications.-New York Times

Last week U.K. citizens voted to leave the European Union, and the fallout was massive: Prime Minister David Cameron resigned and markets dropped worldwide. Many people were shocked by the outcome, despite the fact that polls showed 'Leave' and 'Remain' as dead even the day before the vote.-Financial Times

An analysis of the ages at which hundreds of painters, writers, and classical composers created their most “valuable” works.-Wonkblog

The Wall Street Journal made an algorithm that unpacks Hamilton’s incredibly complex rhyming lyrics—and the results are fascinating. Pop in your headphones, pump the volume, and check out the methodology behind it all.-Wall Street Journal

What percentage of the Billboard Hot 100 were one-hit wonders? What were the most characteristic lyrics each decade? Take a deep dive into a half-century of pop music data to find out.-Kaylin Walker

From Apple’s “Think Different” campaign to a subgenus of trilobites, Miles Davis’ influence extends well beyond jazz. The data viz masters at Polygraph explored the 2,452 English Wikipedia pages that mention this renowned musician to celebrate his 90th birthday.-Polygraph

When someone mentions San Francisco’s housing shortage, they usually cite a limited dataset containing San Francisco Chronicle rental listings from 1979-2001. Eric Fischer took it upon himself to collect and analyze decades of new information by transcribing Chronicle rental ads from 1948-1979 and Craigslist rental listings from 2001 onward.-Experimental Geography

Clinton and Trump are both more strongly disliked than any nominee at this point in the past 10 presidential cycles.-FiveThirtyEight

A fascinating analysis of piracy in the academic publishing industry using download data from Sci-Hub, a site that provides free access to paywalled academic papers.-Science

Google data shows us which major characters were the top five most searched for on the day each episode was originally aired in the US and the day after.-Guardian

Who are the most treacherous characters in Game of Thrones? Why do they do it and who ends up on top?-Venngage

We figured that it will be pretty cool to design some machine learning algorithm that will answer the question that is on every Game of Thrones’ fan mind - which character is likelier to die next?-Technische Universität München

A social network analysis of NBA players who have played on the same team.-Fanatics

Take a tour of Kobe Bryant's key shots over his 20-year career, or explore the makes and misses over his long career.-Los Angeles Times

To investigate the global rise of online harassment, The Guardian commissioned an analysis of the 70 million comments left on their site since 2006. This is a great example of how you can combine data and anecdotes to create a powerful story.-Guardian

It’s not hard to spot the gender inequality in Hollywood, but this analysis goes beyond anecdotal evidence. These fantastic interactive visualizations make the disparity between men and women with speaking roles clear.-Polygraph

Opening up government data is important, but extracting meaning from it is a whole other beast. Enter Data USA, a vast, searchable collection of visualizations of U.S. public data.-Data USA

Data storytellers, take note. BuzzFeed recently published an exposé on the activity of FBI planes monitoring American cities. It’s a major feat of data journalism in its own right, but what’s really impressive is that the reporters made every detail of their analysis available on GitHub.-BuzzFeed

Find yourself muttering “valar morghulis” in anticipation of April 24th? Check out this intricate relationship map of Game of Thrones characters. It just might be enough to tide you over until the Season 6 premiere. Maybe.-Mathematical Association of America

This website is an incredible collection of interactive visualizations aimed at making tricky concepts like Markov chains and regression easy to understand. Schedule a few hours to explore this one—you’re gonna need them.-Explained Visually

The Republican caucus is significantly more conservative than it was then.-Washington Post

Even though Merrick B. Garland is considered a centrist jurist, his appointment to the seat left by Justice Antonin Scalia would result in a historic change in the court.-The Upshot

King’s pawn to E4. If that’s your go-to opening chess move, you’re amongst the majority. Chess fan or not, this analysis is worth the read for it’s detailed commentary and impressive visuals.-Thinking Through the Party

These days, the Brits are drinking less tea and more champagne. What would the Dowager Countess think of that? This comprehensive viz serves up four decades of diet data (and the entire dataset is available for download).-Open Data Institute

Remember these cool visualizations of punctuation in novels from a few weeks back? This post employs the same methods to analyze punctuation patterns in Perl, Ruby, and Python. See if you can guess which is which.-Bastian Greshake

Since 1900, the Senate has voted on eight Supreme Court nominees during an election year. Six were confirmed.-New York Times

Facebook likes aren’t votes, but if they were, Carson and Sanders would have their primary opponents beat.-FiveThirtyEight

Need something to do on your morning commute? Pop in your headphones and listen to one of these TED talks, which run the gamut from global population growth to online dating hacks.-KDnuggets

Ever wonder which artists have covered Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”? Wonder no more. This interactive website visualizes each of the 50 most popular cover songs as its own planetary system, with the original song as the sun and the covers as planets in orbit. It’s a galaxy worth exploring.-Interactive Things

The answer to this question signals a problem much larger than incomplete cartography. Inaccurate and missing data might be what’s holding us back from solving some of Central Africa’s most urgent problems.-Quartz

The original three Disney princesses—Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty—are classic examples of the archetypal damsel in distress. But an analysis of the dialogue in the Disney princess franchise shows that it wasn’t until “The Little Mermaid” that men significantly outspoke the women.-Wonkblog

This is a great example of how civilians can harness open data to analyze the impact of proposed government projects.-CartoDB

These two incredibly powerful visualizations show the refugee flow into Europe over the last three years.-Scientific American

Because how could we not?-Wonkblog

This comes from the man who analyzed 1.1 billion NYC taxi and Uber trips, so you better believe it’s thorough. If you relish meaty analysis, or you just love bikes, this is for you.-Todd W. Schneider

According to Google’s Ngrams database, the 11th is mentioned significantly less than other monthly ordinals. But why? We don’t want to spoil the conclusion, but this post is a good reminder of why you shouldn’t blindly trust data.-Dr. David Hagen

The team at AngeloueEconomics examined a bunch of different factors that affect movie ticket sales—movie quality, ticket prices, population growth—to see if Star Wars really does rule the cinematic galaxy.-AngeloueEconomics

Over the past decade, designer Nick Felton has chronicled each year of his life in gorgeous, colorful charts. He recently released the final installment in his series of Annual Reports. From taking copious notes on his phone to recording everything with commercially available apps and devices, his reports document not just his life, but the advances made in personal data collection over the past 10 years.-The Creators Project

Back in 2009, during his push for the Affordable Care Act, President Obama lauded the community of Grand Junction, CO for keeping Medicare costs low without sacrificing quality health care. Experts believed that if the rest of the nation emulated places like Grand Junction, high medical costs would decrease. So what's the problem? those experts only looked at Medicare data. New research using both Medicare data and private insurance data shows that low Medicare costs don’t correlate to low medical costs at all.-New York Times

There are a bunch of charts out there showing how we spend our time, but Nathan Yau goes the extra mile with this one. Using data from the 2014 American Time Use Survey, he simulated one day for 1,000 Americans down to the minute. Don’t miss this.-FlowingData

Not sure what to get the data lover in your family? ILIKE these box plot snowflake ornaments.-Umbel

Apparently, Democrats are better at SEO than Republicans—Republican presidential candidates average only 5.9 favorable results in the first 10 Google search results, compared to Democratic candidates, who average seven favorable results. Since roughly 75 percent of people use the internet to get their news, how will Google’s rankings affect the outcomes of the 2016 election? (And if AskJeeves were still around, what would he have to say about all this?)-Slate

If you’ve ever seen a photo from the 19th or early 20th century, you’ve probably noticed that our ancestors smiled less than we do today. Now there’s data to prove it.-Wonkblog