Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Jason Norwood-Young

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

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 months 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

2 months 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

2 months 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

2 months 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

2 months 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

2 months 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

2 months 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

2 months 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

2 months 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

2 months 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

2 months 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

2 months ago

Teaching an old map new tricks

A very cool project by the University of Utrecht has geo-mapped over 1,000 old maps from the Ackersdijck Collection (a 19th Century Professor of Economics whose widow donated his map collection to the University) onto their modern lat-longs. You can view the maps through the online tool Georefere...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

But is it art?

How much would you pay for a one-off, original artwork, framed and shipped? If you answered "As much as $119", then I've got some good news for you: The AI Gallery will ship you an original 22x22" framed canvas artwork of your choice, simply by removing the cost of those pesky artists and replaci...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Umbilical Ruminations

Biden snaking his way to victory

Of all the election graphs, and there are many, this is my favourite: FiveThirtyEight's "snake path". In one graph, you can see who's going to win (I think we can safely say Joe Biden, despite his son's antics), and more importantly, why. Until I saw this graph, I didn't understand the US Preside...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Alt.internet: Usenet rises again

Listen here you whippersnappers! Back when I was a young lad, the internet wasn't Facebook or Google or 4Chan. Hell, it wasn't even HTML. It certainly wasn't just port 80. It was a time of great variety and exciting frontiers. We had IRC. We had FTP. We had Gopher, goddamit. And, rising above the...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Sub-editors: learn to stop worrying and love the machine

Shane Creevy, head of editorial at journalism/AI company Kinzen, believes that the always-tenuous sub-editor role could be in for a revival, as they are perfectly positioned to act as the gatekeeper for the burgeoning machine learning in journalism sector. "The sub-editor is the sapien in the mac...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Mapping the world of academic papers with Connected Papers

If your job is writing (or reading) academic papers, my condolences. But here's a sparkly new tool that'll certainly help you in your work: Connected Papers. Built by Israelis Alex Tarnavsky, Eitan Eddie Smolyansky, and Itay Knaan Harpaz, this tool they made for themselves proved so popular that ...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Bot-attack! GPT-3 sneaks onto Reddit, talks about suicide

"A GPT-3-powered bot has been caught posing as a human on Reddit after more than a week of rampant posting on one of the site’s most popular subreddits," reports The Next Web, churning out a post a minute on /r/AskReddit. Posting as thegentlemetre, it answered the question: "Elevator-maintenance ...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Tracking the Uyghur tragedy with data

The human rights abuses in the Chinese Xinjiang region has led to multiple data projects, as digital activists do what they can from outside (and sometimes, at great risk, inside) China to record and expose the atrocities. The Xinjiang Data Project is an Australian effort to highlight the issue, ...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago