Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Don’t Miss

Don't Miss, My Corona

Have 19 out of 20 Covid cases gone undetected?

Official stats record just over 650 000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in South Africa, but the question epidemiologists around the world are struggling to answer is how many cases have there been that we don't know about? Discovery Health boss Ryan Noach has crunched some numbers and come up with a...

a week ago

How big are the West Coast wildfires?

Pictures of red skies over San Francisco are one thing, but The Guardian rams home the scale of the devastation caused by the current wildfires along the West Cost of the US with a simple square. By overlaying the size of the fires on maps of other regions, it shows that if the epicentre of the f...

a week ago

Where the streets have a name

Map nerd Alasdair Rae deconstructs British street maps by their designation, such as Street, Road, Way, etc, and pops them onto beautiful maps that tell the history of a town. "In Milton Keynes, and some other places, you also get streets with no second name, like where they are just called thing...

Jason Norwood-Young

a week ago

Nadieh’s satellite surge

We've featured Nadieh Bremer's work on Naked Data before, and chances are high that we will again because she just keeps on delivering stunning data visualisations. In her latest piece for Scientific America, she combines a bump chart with a steam graph to produce this unique and information-pack...

Jason Norwood-Young

9 days ago

Time for fossil fuels to jump off a cliff

Vox's Ezra Klein takes a look at the US' reliance on fossil fuel, a relationship that is going to have to end immediately if the world is going to hit its target of keeping global warming under 2°C. All that stuff is important if we'd like to keep living on this planet, but the thing I want you t...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

“How we think matters more than what we know”

This fascinating piece by data visualiser Jane Zhang takes us through her process when sinking her teeth into a data project visualising Teken. It's part a how-to; part a peek into her thoughts, fears, hurdles, and growth. For an article on the process of designing a data visualisation, it feels ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Don't Miss, Nerds

Stunning height maps with a free tool

Using 3D maps to discover population "towers" has just taken a massive leap forward, thanks to a ray-tracing renderer called Aerialod. This type of visualisation has been with us for some time -- see The Pudding's incredible 2018 Human Terrain project here. But it lacked the visual richness that ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Making the case for legalisation in Nigeria with numbers

Dataphyte digs into the official stats around drug crime in Nigeria and finds the numbers wanting. It calls shenanigans on the seventy-fold increase in the number of crimes in 2019 compared to 2018, and follows up with a second story about the 450-billion naira which could be harvested in revenue...

2 weeks ago

You can judge a burb by its colour

The New York Times data viz team takes a different look at predicting which way US voters will swing -- the colour of their environment. Green areas (denoting farmland and rural areas) voted Trump, while grey areas (generally urban) voted (unsuccessfully) for Clinton. I'm not sure whether this in...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Map bug reveals notorious Xinjiang camps

Investigators discovered a bug in China's Baidu maps when looking at Xinjiang internment camps, effectively highlighting the very thing they were meant to hide.

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Don’t be a jerk

Tracking the career development of more than 671 students over a decade and a half of their working life is quite the longitudinal study. Nevertheless, Cameron Anderson (a professor at the University of California, Berkley) undertook the mammoth task in order to answer the age old question: do yo...

3 weeks ago

The numbers that make up the Pacific sex trade

We can almost - almost - forgive the introduction of an interactive wordle into this piece by The Kontinentalist on sex-trafficking in Asia Pacific. It's an uncomfortable dig into numbers that reveal seven out of ten victims are from the region, using numbers to highlight the systemic weaknesses ...

3 weeks ago

A chilling warning from FiveThirtyEight: Don’t count Trump out

Having been caught out by the last US Presidential Election, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver is going to great pains to try and explain that polls are both fallible and routinely misread: "... the FiveThirtyEight presidential election forecast, which we launched today, still has Trump with a 29 per...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

How big was the Beirut blast?

Reuters Graphics regularly produces stunning work, but this comparison of blast sizes using rectangles is a stand-out. While massive (the equivalent of 200 to 300 tons of explosives), Beirut turns out to not have been the largest accidental explosion of all time, with a 1921 blast in Germany (1,0...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

Don't Miss, Umbilical Ruminations

The media is a tool of the political elite, and other folk tales

A new report speaks to the people who have eschewed the media, believing it to be biased, commercialised, captured, or often just depressing.

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

Five years of violence

The Jewish Museum Berlin's visualisation of more than four thousand incidents of anti-antisemitic violence in pre-war Germany is powerful stuff. Each dot is a detailed, documented incident, which can be grouped accorded to geography, time, target or perpetrator and each click draws you in as patt...

4 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Counting Covid-19 cash and contracts

Over at Mail & Guardian, the data team is keeping tabs on dodgy dealings in Covid-19 contracts and calling on the crowd to help. Most provinces have now published reports for spending on PPE (which the revenue services says has been "open day" for cheats), but the reports leave much to be des...

4 weeks ago

Documenting harrasment of journalists in Zim

With the exception of those few who managed to pivot to hand soap sales, not many of us are having a great 2020. Spare a thought, though, for journalists in Zimbabwe, who really do have it worse than most. The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) has just published its mid-year state of the ...

4 weeks ago

Don't Miss, Happenings

Bellingcat, the movie

The South African International Documentary Festival is in full-swing, with tons of great local and international films to feast on. Although it's all online, the organisers are trying to mimic the worst of a real cinema experience (apart from the guy spilling popcorn down the back of your shirt)...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Get offroad with Google Maps

While you probably use Google Maps to check if your local supermarket is still open when you have a craving for cookies at 9:45pm (yes, it's open for another 15 minutes, hurry!), you can also use it to burn off those cookies by getting out into the wild for a walk or ride. The new Google Maps ove...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago