Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Don’t Miss

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

10 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

10 days ago

Scrollytelling disaster (in a good way)

Starting with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 which put paid to the town of Pompeii and fastforwarding to the 20th Century, Mohamed A Waked has created a short history of natural disasters in scrollytelling form. It's comprehensive - there are over 15,000 events mentioned and the 1,440 whi...

10 days ago

Best of breed

Your Best Friend (TM) is part wolf and is ready to eat you the minute the sticks stops throwing and the kibbles stop coming. But what else is doggie DNA made up of? Other dogs of course! But which ones? To help figure it out, the Guardian has mapped out the relationships between 161 breeds. Woof.

11 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

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

Don't Miss, My Corona

Tackling covid scams in Kenya

Never letting a good crisis go to waste, scammers are exploiting Covid-19 all over the planet, and nowhere is safe. Fortunately, journalists have risen to the occasion, with great work like Sophie Hill's My Little Crony piecing together links between politicians and PPE suppliers in the UK and th...

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

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

Nigeria’s social media censorship bill is a killer

Culturecustodian's simple Instagram story tells us everything we need to know about the controversial Protection of Internet Falsehood And Manipulation And Other Related Offences Bill (the Social Media Bill) currently passing through the Nigerian parliament. The Bill, one of two which were mostly...

3 weeks ago

Up, up and away

It's too pretty to be sinister, but we all know what red balloons signify about the future of the child holding it in a horror movie, and so it is with DFRLab's elegant interactive which depicts social media misinformation stories as helium filled things of fun. There's a back story on its creati...

3 weeks ago

Put your best foot forward

Many happy moments of childhood were spent scouring Richard Scarry books for hidden features in a normal-looking scene have primed me for these: Dorothy's crazy exploded diagrams showing important moments in the development of the training shoe, the Apple Mac, the Vox amp and more. Beautiful and ...

3 weeks 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

Can Google predict where Covid-19 will strike?

Dan Sinker has spotted a potentially important correlation in Google Trends data - Covid-19 outbreaks are accompanied by a proportional increase in the number of people searching for terms like "loss of taste". Seems obvious in hindsight, but The Washington Post has picked up the theme to look at...

a month ago

Only racist for the money?

Tessa Knight's painstakingly detailed uncovering of a network of South African websites which predict race war and the notion of "white genocide" is a masterpiece of digital sleuthing. She's traced hundreds of scam domains full of clickbait and lies, including one straightforward rip-off of an Af...

a month ago

The seesawing scales of justice

The inimitable Mona Chalabi turns her eye for capturing the vagaries of data science onto the ascension of Amy Coney Barret to the US Supreme Court, indicating the balance of "left leaning" and "right leaning" judges and their voting habits over time using... a balance. The liberal use of Plastic...

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

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

a month ago