Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Don’t Miss

Maybe it does strike twice?

It's one thing to intellectually know that storms are seasonal things, but the most striking (see what I did?) thing about the realtime lightning tracker from Lightning Maps is seeing how cleanly the world is split when it comes to rain right now. I wouldn't want to be in the middle of the Atlant...

yesterday at 07:38 am

US poll-predicting guru reckons Trump is going down

Professor of history at the American University, Allan Lichtman, has managed to correctly predict every US presidential election since 1984. He has 13 key questions that he asks, and six or more for either candidate predicts the winner. Even though I've given you the outcome, this New York Times ...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 07:23 am

Ammonium nitrate through the ages

The devastating explosion in Beirut last week was the result of years of foolish neglect by a weak and corrupt government. But while it may be the biggest accident of its kind on record, as has been documented in many excellent reports it's far from the only one. Visual Capitalist has put togethe...

yesterday at 07:22 am

South China Morning Post: The undisputed infographic champion

Let's face it: most infographics are shit. Often, as my eyeballs bleed as I look at unrelated clipart stuck next to seemingly random numbers and misleading charts, I wonder whether the entire infographic idea should be relegated to the nearest garbage disposal. But it doesn't have to be like this...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 07:13 am

Fakers waste no time on Beirut explosion

I don't know whether fakers put time and energy into exploiting disasters for likes, lols, or to destabilise world peace for profit, but given any disaster, we can be certain these scum won't be far behind with their second-rate Photoshop techniques. In the case of the earth-shattering Beirut exp...

Jason Norwood-Young

yesterday at 05:48 am

The best Corona graph – we can all go home now

I don't know what it is about the Financial Times that I like so much. Perhaps it's the salmon background; perhaps it's its excellent arts section over the weekend, best read in the Utrecht library while sipping a cup of koffie verkeerd. The only thing I don't like is its ridiculous subscription ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Cash for graphs

The inestimable Mediahack must have set some kind of record for crowdsourcing in South Africa. Within a day and a half of asking people to support its popular SA Coronavirus Dashboard (views two million and counting), it exceeded its target of R30K to cover some of the costs of this labour of lov...

2 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Going nowhere fast

News that Zambia has just opened its borders to travellers who can produce a recent negative Covid-19 test certificate made us want to find more information about which other countries are loosening up international restrictions. And as this updated map from Kayak shows, the answer is "not many"....

2 weeks ago

Chalabi, interviewed

Regular readers will be very familiar with Mona Chalabi's data visualisations -- she's one of my personal favourite visualisers, and at the forefront of merging art and data without losing the impact of either. Artnet has a rare interview with her here, and (like her vizes) help flesh out a compl...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, ROTM

Smile! You’re on candid camera!

Coronavirus isn't the only reason to wear a facemask if you're protesting -- an increasing risk of facial recognition could see you targeted by police after the fact, as they did in Baltimore following protests over Freddie Gray's death. According to this article in The Guardian, Clearview AI has...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

How the (visualisation) sausage gets made

Andy Kirk takes on a massive Corona-time project, interviewing ten data visualisers in nine episodes of his Explore Explain season. I've watched Maarten Lambrechts' interview about Why Budapest, Warsaw, and Lithuania split themselves in two, published on The Pudding. What I love about this interv...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Counting Covid

The Covid-19 news from South Africa this week has been bleak: over a quarter of tests now come back positive, and the country has the fourth highest number of daily new infections in the world. The two bright spots of news we're hanging on to is that there are far more tests being carried out her...

3 weeks ago

Song lyrics are horrible

Jake Scott's analysis of popular song lyrics scraped from modern music box Spotify starts off on a surprising and positive note. The representation of women in top tunes far outweighs the representation of men. And then it gets very dark, very quickly. Male artists sing about men making money, dy...

3 weeks ago

Nigeria’s national debt is terrifying

There's a cold phrase that gets bandied around in acronym-heavy press-releases from the UN, IMF, G7, et al - HIPC. It stands for Highly Indebted Poor Countries, who were in danger of being swamped by debt before covid-19 crashed the world economy. What does HIPC mean for folk on the ground? Datap...

3 weeks ago

Fantastic plastic

What happens to plastic when it gets recycled? Sure, there's the helpful symbols on the back of every crisp packet and carton with a cryptic indication of what it's made of, but what do they mean for the processing plants that turn rubbish in to new fibres for fleeces and so on? Life of Plastic h...

4 weeks ago

If the Romans had built a subway

It's a fitting tribute to the genius of Harry Beck that "Topography x drawn in the style of the London Underground map" is a burgeoning genre of pop-art. While there is much to choose from, Sasha Trubetsky's Roman Roads transit map of Europe in the classical era is still one of the best.

4 weeks ago

The death of the local newspaper, and the birth of something darker

It's not news anymore that local news services are dying in the US, and it's been a long-running concern that there's nothing else that informs an electorate of local political decisions, or acts as a watchdog for your councils' spending. An unpaid blogger is not going to voluntarily sit in gover...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 weeks ago

Fuck cars, we don’t need them

I'm pointing you to Farhad Manjoo's story of a vision of a car-free society (in America of all places) not only because I've been happily car-free for two years, but also to look at the stunning visualisations that the New York Times just casually threw into this down-page piece, weirdly categori...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Where does all the plastic go?

It takes a while to get to the meat of Visual Capitalist's infographic on plastic recycling, but the kicker is about half way down. Up until 2018, everyone shipped their recyclables to China, which then introduced its National Sword policy, banning these imports. It signalled the "end of easy rec...

a month ago

Visualising the reduction in car accidents

Regular readers will recognise this link to SAMRC's weekly update on mortality numbers in South Africa. The bad news is that there's an upward trend in death rates that's starting to look like the impact of Covid-19. The good news is that deaths from "unnatural causes" (homicides, car accidents) ...

a month ago