Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Jason Norwood-Young

Journalist, developer, community builder, newsletter creator and international man of mystery.

The everyman’s guide on denying science

I'm hopeful that as a Naked Data reader, you have some kind of belief in an evidence-based reality. But this isn't true for everyone, and QAnon, Covid-denialism, Trump, and the rise of the ultra-left and right is a stark reminder of how many people employ cognitive dissonance as a shield, or weap...

Jason Norwood-Young

11 days ago

The big elections map wrap-up, by an expert

Who better to comment on maps? Stamen's lead cartographer, Alan McConchie, takes a retrospective on his favourite maps to emerge from the US elections. We've covered a lot of these individually, but there are a few gorgeous examples that we missed, like Le Monde's brilliant mix of cartogram and t...

Jason Norwood-Young

11 days ago

MozFest, Amsterdam goes virtual

8 March 2021Amsterdam, Online Mozilla's annual festival, MozFest, discussing how to make the internet a better place for all, will be held in Amsterdam and -- predictably -- virtually too next year. This huge event typically attracts over 3,000 participants from 82 countries, and if you've got so...

Jason Norwood-Young

11 days ago

Check out my new (AI) logo

As an ex-journalist-turned-software developer, I am very aware that AI will one day take all my career options. But not today. Today, it's the turn of designers to get turfed out onto the street. Zyro is a Foursquare-ish website hosting company that has released some pretty nifty AIs to help you ...

Jason Norwood-Young

12 days ago

The ultimate election-nerd page

While the big news agencies impressed with great graphics, magnificent maps and cutting commentary, a little open-sourced page hosted on Github that valiantly scraped away at the New York Times became the go-to source for election results. (Since some of those results are still trickling in, the ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Pollster: It’s not us, it’s you

Another election, another disaster for pollsters who could have done better predicting from the swoop of the swallows than the responses from the American public. But the problem isn't the pollsters, claims chief Haruspex at Ntrailz, Matthew Dessem: it's us. We just didn't understand the prophets...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

The political winds are a-changin’

Not content with the usual selection of elections maps, Washington Post was inspired by the amount of hot air being generated by the politicians, and used wind map code to produce this sexy-as-hell election map. I'm blown away.

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

The Guardian’s dataviz tour of the US elections

The Guardian gets deep into the election data with a smorgasbord of visualisations, starting from the swing arrow maps that proved very popular in this US election, to some kind of bubble bar graph that is probably a bit more form than function. Still, we forgive them the bubble-bar for that beau...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Spaghetti Western

The New York Times has built handsome spaghetti line charts showing which counties swung more Democrat or Republican over the last four US elections, in a very slick scrollytelling format. It's immediately clear that rural, educated voters moved the dial for Biden, but I'm just as interested in t...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Microsoft’s Charticulator gets open sourced

Microsoft's incredibly powerful charting app, Charticulator, has been quietly open sourced under an MIT license. While it's built to use with PowerBI, you can import data directly to it and make some stunning visualisations, like this sweet flowing bar graph or this Sankey diagram.

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Dive into Pandas visualisations

If you're looking to take your Pandas game to the visualisation level, Rashida Nasrin Sucky has got your back. Touted as an ultimate Pandas visualisation "cheat sheet", it's more of a fast dive into data visualisation with your favourite Python data frame library. Dive in here.

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Point at things! Annotations come to Datawrapper

Annotations add meaning and insight into data visualisations, and they're one of my favourite tricks, so it's surprising that so few data visualisation applications offer them. But Datawrapper.de, which has been popping out some great new features recently, has now added an annotation feature to ...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

A toll for polls

The failure, for the second US Presidential election in a row, of polling, has plenty of people asking whether polls are useless, damaging, or both. But this isn't a new conversation. In one of many classic examples, the 1948 Truman vs Dewey polling in favour of Dewey convinced the media so much ...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Winning big with US election maps

I'm a big fan of election maps, having built one myself, and (like everyone else) I've had one eye on the results coming in on the too-close-to-call 2020 US Presidential Election all day. After trying quite a few options, I settled on Al Jazeera, which opted for a cartographic instead of a geogra...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Umbilical Ruminations

Greenwald quits The Intercept, claiming censorship over Biden

Famed investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald is having a very public spat with his now-former-employer, The Intercept, over the very serious point of editorial censorship around the Joe Biden campaign. "The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractu...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Unlocking that PDF data with pd3f

It's 2020, and we're still trying to extract data trapped in shitty PDFs. And weirdly, we're still using the same tools that started life in 1985. (I see you, Tesseract, you old bastard.) Pd3f isn't exactly a new set of tools, but it does take the old tools that we love (like Tabula), adds some m...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Stale air: How the Coronavirus loves company (and closed rooms)

Some stunning visualisations by El País explain how likely aerosols are to spread the Coronavirus in enclosed spaces, like your home, a restaurant and a school. Irrespective of whether safe distances are maintained, if the six people spend four hours together talking loudly, without wearing a fac...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

The only way to watch the US Presidential Debate

Data story org Gramener turned the latest US presidential debate into an interactive comic, and it's now the only way I ever want to watch two old men debating politics again. It's a surprisingly engaging medium - I ended up going through most of the debate, which definitely didn't happen with th...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Republicans not so conservative with Corona

Dan Goodspeed has made one of those racing-bar-charts, this time showing Coronavirus infections per 100,000 by US state, and coloured by their voting partisanship. You can tell where this is going, but seeing the swathe of red still comes as a bit of a shock - of the 25 worst-affected states curr...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Au revoir D3, hello Svelte

D3 is incredibly powerful, but not always the easiest to use. Data journalist for the French publication Les Echos, Tom Fevrier, takes us through another option: responsive data viz with Javascript library Svelte. No more forgetting to "exit()". The video is in French, but it's pretty easy to fol...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago