Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Jason Norwood-Young

Journalist, developer, community builder, newsletter creator and international man of mystery, Jason was one of the first South Africans to really grasp the importance of data in the newsroom and has remained one step ahead of the trends in the field all the way. Even Naked Data was conceived before email newsletters were cool again. But what does that tell you about the measure of the man? Nothing, that's what. He hides the superman CV behind a truly mild-mannered and overly modest persona and is best described as "one of the nicest guys in the business". When he's angry, it is righteously so, and his anger always wears velvet mittens. The true signs of his genius include the ability to create multilingual puns on demand (witness the alternative Naked Data strap "Putting the heita in to data") and the fact that he offered me a job. (AO)

Twenty-four decades of the American Census

I won't go as far as to say that The Pudding has been a bit off lately, but let's just say that an unusual amount of time has passed since we last featured them. The latest offering from this visual essay publisher, however, breaks the drought convincingly with an incredibly detailed yet still fa...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Coronadashboard – this time for Africa

I know you're sick of Coronoavirus dashboards, but this one focuses on the ticking timebomb of the African continent. Created by Juliet Atellah and Alan Kawamara, the data is updated daily, and features plenty of dashboardy-visualisations care of Flourish. With countries like the Central African ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Datum, My Corona

Get yer Merican Corona data here

The US might be bad at universal healthcare, gun control and electing decent presidents (admittedly, the latter seems to be a global problem), but it is very good at data. And The Atlantic's COVID Tracking Project is a true example of the best of America: clever engineering, committed people, tea...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

My Corona, Nerds

Engineering our way out of Covid-19

While it's tempting to spend lockdownd-time binge-watching Netflix, you could spend your time creating cool open source problems to the Coronavirus crisis instead. Helpful Engineering is a new community that has exploded, with 3,400 volunteers working on over 35 projects (at time of writing). The...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Covid-19: The podcast

Excuse the slightly misleading headline. There is a Covid-19 podcast, but tbh I'd rather actually catch Covid-19. This podcast, however, is actually about how journalists are going about covering the Coronavirus, as opposed to the disease itself, which is, imho, MUCH more interesting. Find out ab...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Book learnin', Nerds

Learn D3 today (well, probably not all of it today)

If you've suddenly got time on your hands, you're looking to learn something new, and if you're honest with yourself you're not actually going to start yoga, then check out Mike "The Legend" Bostock's intro to the graphing library that rules the interwebs, D3.js, at https://observablehq.com/@d3/l...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Every .za website MUST link to SA’s Coronavirus site

Say what? According to legislation published in March 2020's Government Gazette, all websites ending with a .za in their domain name will need to carry a link on their front page to SA's official Coronavirus website. 5.1.4 All internet sites operating within the .zaDNA toplevel domain name must h...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Data journalism in the time of cholera

Some of the most famous infographics -- John Snow's Broad Street Pump (1854) and Florence Nightingale's rose diagram (1858) -- have been born out of the need to save lives in times of disease. Neither of these however could be considered data journalism. Infographic historian Scott Klein has unea...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Flatten the TP curve

I made a joke about flattening the curve of the toilet paper panic buying, and realised that it's also an important thing to keep in mind -- stockpiling is bad for everyone.

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Corona-tracking for South Africa

The Media Hack team -- Laura Grant, Alastair Otter and Tanya Pampalone -- has taken the lead on visualising the spread of Covid-19 in South Africa with its Coronavirus ZA Dashboard. The numbers are based on the government's official announcements, so take it from whence it comes, but on the whole...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Don't Miss, Umbilical Ruminations

We need a flattened curve hero

Disease and plague stalk the land. Panic and fear grips our hearts and makes us buy all the toilet paper. What we need is a hero, and one has emerged: the Flatten the Curve infographic. In two simple lines, a single image says: "This is why we need to take it seriously, but don't freak out either."

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

So how does disease spread anyway?

The Washington Post's scrollystory on epidemics (Warning: Paywall ahead) explains how diseases spread in a group of people, and shows how to stop an epidemic -- something we wished we all knew a month ago, when this story first came out. But it's still a great explanation of concepts like the bas...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Dragons sitting on their grains of rice

It's extremely hard for us humans to get an accurate sense of very large numbers. The difference between 100,000 and 1,000,000 is hard to comprehend. (Tim Urban's brilliant 1 to 1,000,000 should help you with that). TikTokker Humphrey Yang uses grains of rice to picture Jeff Bezos' $122 BILLION w...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Howto: D3.js animated scrollytelling

Everyone loves a that effect when your visualisation reacts to your scroll... it makes you, the reader, feel like you're part of the story. And now thanks to Cuthbert Chow, you really can be part of the story, and make your own awesome D3 viz with this extremely detailed walkthrough.

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

There’s a marmot hiding in your map

It turns out mapmakers have a sense of humor, and when they see a familiar pattern in a landscape, they don't always resist the urge to fill in a few lines and create a miniature artwork, hidden in plain sight. They're a bit more accessible than the artworks hidden on computer chips, which you'd ...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

If music be the food of love, copyright it

So, I have some good news for songwriters everywhere, and I have some bad news. I'll start with the bad news: Any song you write in the future has been already "discovered" and copyrighted, either by some artist in the past, else definitely by the team of Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin. They used a ...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Connecting the dots

I recently ponied up for the New York Times' crossword service, and got lucky because it was just at the same time it launched its new game, Vertex: lucky because it turns out I'm shit at crosswords, but am capable of joining dots like a five-year-old. It's a truly great game, and if you haven't ...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Have your notebook and eat it

Visual Studio Code: It's the first Microsoft product I've used since Windows 2000, and it's brilliant. (I use the Insiders version in case you're interested.) But it couldn't do everything... I found myself still turning to other environments for Notebooks, which have revolutionised software deve...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Freeeeedom!

Friends! Throw off the yoke from around your neck, and stop tilling the fields of your lord and master Google. "But Google provides our food and shelter", I hear you say. "We need it. We can't live without it!" But you can, friends! You can supplant Google from your life, and these are the Degoog...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Don't Miss, Nerds

Get exploring

https://explorabl.es If you're a stranger to Nicky Case's work, do yourself a huge favour, block off some hours, and check out Fireflies, The Evolution of Trust, and the extremely relevant Parable of the Polygons. Or go right down the rabbit-hole and see all of their work here. But we've covered ...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago