Stephen Thomas – Earth

Tools, Events, Courses

Those of you who have fallen in love with d3.js should absolutely follow d3noob.org, an interesting blog where you can get useful tips and two free e-books on d3 and leaflet.js.

Ekuatorial is a new website built to display environmental changes through digital cartography. Read more about this ‘geo-journalism’ experiment in this introduction on Visualoop.

Did you know that Randy Krum, founder of Cool Infographics, is on tour for a series of events on data visualization? Check out his roadmap and don’t miss the date.

A new course on data journalism is about to start next week at Wits Journalism in Johannesburg. The course begins on Monday 17 and will be held by New York Time’s Ron Nixon.

Data Stories

San Valentine is getting closer: give yourself a minute to read this curious infographic on its origin and on how it is celebrated around the world.

The Sochi winter Olympics just started, and Twitter Data already published a visualization on it. See Tweets about #Sochi2014 on datawrapper. You might also want to scroll down this infographic on which winter Olympic sport would you play? posted on Visually.

The Global Investigative Journalism Network recently posted a graph on last week’s most popular data journalism links. If you wonder what topic recently captured data-addicted attention around the world, you should absolutely see it or play with the interactive version.

Data Sources

Accurat is an Italian information design agency which surely represents the avant garde in the data visualization market. If you are curious about how it works and what’s its operating model watch the interview with one of its co-founder, Giorgia Lupi, at the New York School of Visual Arts.

The Online Journalism Blog of Paul Bradshaw is always a gold mine of good informations. If you are looking for some tips and suggestions on data journalism, here you may find some.

Finally, we remind you that the Portuguese version of The Data Journalism Handbook is now available here.

United Nations Photo – Climate Change Effects in Island Nation of Kiribati

Tools, Events, Courses

If you are a wannabe mapper and you need to acquire skills to manage your digital exploration tools you might be interested in registering at the “Online mapping for beginner” course of CartoDB starting on December the 3^rd. Hurry up: only few places left!

Daniel Smilkov, Deepak Jagdish and César Hidalgo are three MIT students that developed a visualization tool called Immersion. Immersion helps you visualizing your network of e-mail contacts using only “From”, “To”, “Cc” without taking into account any kind of content.

JavaScript is one of the most common programming language frequently used to create beautiful visualizations. Follow this tutorial from dry.ly if you want to learn it bypassing D3.js. Practice makes perfect!

Data Stories

Yesterday, Transparency International launched it’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) ranking countries according to perceived levels of corruption. Have a look at the results and see how your country ranks.

Everyone knows what a bar chart is but have you ever heard about trilinear plots? This post from Alberto Cairo introduces a short consideration on new forms of data representations and on when to break conventions in information design.

The goal of the Digital Methods Initiative of the Amsterdam University is to map and analyze causes, effects and possible future scenarios deriving from climate change. As part of this project, the students from Density Design Research Lab wrote a wonderful post outlining their visual design take on climate change.

Gender inequality is one of those big issues which varies enormously from country to country. If you are wondering what countries have the worst gender gap a look at the map published on the Slate Magazine by Jamie Zimmerman, Nicole Tosh, and Nick McClellan.

There are a lot of visualizations you can make from data coming from social networks, especially from those coming from the biggest one: Facebook. Take a minute to see those posted in this curious article from Armin Grossenbacher: “Visualising (not so) Big Data”.

In Australia bushfires occur frequently. Look at the amazing interactive story that The Guardian published on their history, showing maps with data on temperatures, hectares of land burnt and number of properties damaged.

Not everyone knows that we just passed the World Aids Day on the first of December. Tariq Khokhar reminds us the global situation of the disease in this article from the World Bank Data Blog.

Data Sources

Datavisualization.fr extracted the list of the 5 most influential tweets of November containing the hashtag #dataviz from a database of about 10.100 posts. Read it here and see who did best.

Christimas is getting closer. If you need some good suggestions on what to buy to your friends and parents take a moment to read the FlowingData Gift Guide and you’ll find some interesting data-gifts for your data-lovers.