Naked Data - All the data you can eat

Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Ding Dong, The Wicked Witch of Twitter is Dead

Ah, remember when Trump used to be President, and on Twitter. He always had such nice things to say about everybody. The New York Times has compiled a list of all those nice things, The Complete List of Trump’s Twitter Insults (2015-2021). We'll sure miss his sunshine and rainbows on the social m...

Jason Norwood-Young

21 hours ago

The state of Javascript, 2020

My favourite nerd report is out, The State of Javascript - an annual deep dive into the current state of the ever-growing Javascript world. Unsurprisingly but disappointingly, it's still dominated by white, English-speaking men from Europe and North America. Fortunately wealth of Javascript tools...

Jason Norwood-Young

21 hours ago

A world of female founders

A few things you should know about woman-led startups. There aren't enough of them, they find it harder to get funding than male-led businesses and yet they create more jobs and revenue. Business Financing has put together this awesome map using Crunchbase's data of the most successful female ent...

22 hours ago

Don't Miss, Umbilical Ruminations

Who’s who in the coup?

GIJN has a nice article detailing some of the research techniques used by Bellingcat et al to identify participants in the riots at the US Capitol two weeks ago. It includes links to useful OSINT tools like Hunch.ly and The Wayback Machine, and some that may not be familiar like facial recognitio...

22 hours ago

Where did all the green spaces go?

Good news - one of Joe Biden's first acts as Pres of the USA was to rejoin the Paris Accord and commit to environmental goals. Bad news, the planet is in a really rough shape. But all is not lost. Vizzuality's Where The Wild Things Aren't tracks wilderness loss over the 300 years to the millenniu...

23 hours ago

RStudio’s Rainbow Release

Popular R IDE RStudio's had a pretty big update this weekend, largely focussed on speeding up code production by a visual Markdown editor and much improved support for Python. Be honest, though. What you're really excited about is the multicoloured brackets - or rainbow parenthesis. So pretty. Ge...

23 hours ago

Accessible data visualisation – beyond colour blindness

It's pretty low-hanging fruit to ensure your data visualisation uses colourblind-friendly colours - most colour pickers will give you a colourblind-safe palette. But moving beyond that isn't just a matter of laziness, argues data viz guy Frank Elavsky over on Twitter: there's also systemic racism...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 02:04 am

Happy birthday, Wikipedia

It was 20 years ago today, Jimmy Wales taught the band to play. The band being the internet, and the song being Wikipedia, of course. You may not have seen much coverage of this noteworthy anniversary locally - although internationally the site that killed Encarta is much celebrated. That's partl...

a week ago

Manipulating media in Uganda

Waiting for the results of yesterday's general election in Uganda isn't exactly a nail-biting affair - no sensible bookie would be taking bets on the outcome - for outsiders and fans of democracy there has to be mixed emotions. Museveni's crackdown on opposition parties and their leaders, indepen...

8 days ago

In praise of annotations

A picture says a thousand words, but is a mere ten hundred enough? Of course not. Storytelling with Data highlights the importance of adding text to your charts, and the power of the humble annotation to transform a graph into a story. Check it out here.

8 days ago

The top 10 Covid-19 data projects

DataJournalism.com has listed its choice of its top 10 data journalism Covid-19 projects for 2020, and it's worth going through the list just in case you missed one.

Jason Norwood-Young

8 days ago

2020, from Soleimani to Four Seasons Total Landscaping

I know it's hard to remember by this point, but 2020 was a pretty big news near. My new-favourite publication (particularly their news letters), Axios, has published a great chart of the news patterns of 2020, based on Google data. It's very American, but still worth drooling over, except that Ax...

Jason Norwood-Young

8 days ago

Social media isn’t actually secret, discovers Parler users

You would think that QAnon believers, militia members and people who believe in a massive nationwide conspiracy to steal the vote from Trump would naturally be quite a paranoid bunch. Not paranoid enough, it seems. For some reason, they believed that the videos and photos they posted of themselve...

Jason Norwood-Young

8 days ago

SA ups its Covid-viz game

The fresh start to the new year many hoped for didn't really happen in South Africa, what with lockdowns and booze bans and a second wave/new strain of coronavirus setting new records for detected cases and deaths daily (there are more active cases now than at any point last year - although this ...

2 weeks ago

Grab your tickets for Outlier

The Data Visualization Society is kicking off the new year with its Outlier conference, which starts on 5 Feb and runs over the course of the weekend. It's a virtual event, with 40-odd speakers (and counting) from all over the world (although not a great showing from African countries - down to f...

2 weeks ago

The 38 months of 2020, in pictures

It sure has been a year! To quote The Killers: It started off with a kiss, how did it end up like this? The New York Times' Year in Pictures kicks off with kissing and jubilation in Times Square at New Years, and ends with Santa behind a plexiglass shield.

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Scotland’s snowplows have the best names

Scotland's road gritters might sound like tough machines, clearing snow and icing roads, but they have the best names: Gangsta Granny Gritter, Ready Spready Go, For Your Ice Only, License to Chill, and Spready Mercury, amongst others. There's also a great map to track them here.

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

The Correspondent to close by year-end

Dutch publisher De Correspondent's English language publication, The Correspondent, will not see in 2021. According to NiemanLab, the last day of publication will be 31 December 2020. While there's zero schadenfreude on my behalf -- I really wanted it to succeed, and I am a subscriber -- the warn...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

The console war is over and everyone lost

Try as I might to turn my back on the games industry (where I worked for many years), I can't help but be drawn in by stats and news of weird and wonderfully juvenile bugs in new games. Stats like the ones published by Visual Capitalist showing the rise of the mobile phone as the dominant platfor...

a month ago