We are trying to create a list of in-copyright novels that contain maps. If you know of some, drop them in the thread below! 🧵👇
Principal Engineer at Confluent. Ex-Noteable, Apple, Netflix, Stanford. I write sometimes and talk too much.
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We are trying to create a list of in-copyright novels that contain maps. If you know of some, drop them in the thread below! 🧵👇
We can only hope so.
Most people don't know that Avicenna only spoke English when enacting metaphors from the Greek pantheon.
996 getting a lot of attention these days but there's the other extreme: Focusing so much on People First that you end up hugging yourself to death.
I feel like the relentless drumbeat of superficial color accessibility has lead to just terrible color decisions.
Enjoying @nadiehbremer.com's CHART (and the sun 😁). It's a great book — Nadieh's work is amazing anyways, and I love how generously she shares her tricks and recipes. www.routledge.com/CHART-Design...
I am shocked. The US strikes Iran with 180 tons of explosives and the protest is so small that in a photo on CNN you can see a guy walking in the background with a shopping bag. In contrast, when Qasem Soleimani was killed there were millions of protestors.
I appreciate that you remind us of the seagull attack at just the right rate so it doesn't seem like you're milking it for laughs and that we can earnestly relive it and totally have sympathy and not at all amusement at your being maimed in such an absurd way.
Growing up in the central valley, we would say "yo-se-MITE" as a fun way of referring to Yosemite and everyone I knew thought it was cute and fine. Just own it and be cooler than those pronunciation police.
But that doesn't work so well when your color names include "ruby dust" or "seasoned green apple" in your available names...
Distinct color names are important for data visualization when you're presenting so that you don't have someone say "What about the green bar" and you have to say "You mean this green" and they say "No the other green." meodai.github.io/color-name-a...
Ooh - some great #dataviz resources in here
I asked AI to explain the differences in models in meme form and I told it to explain it to me in peak gen x and it is, I think, the first true piece of AI art ever created.
Gee, I wonder if this rule was coined during GB1's term...
(I know I just shared this one internally: www.linkedin.com/pulse/dual-a...)
Checks out: Cars sucked in the 90s.
I couldn't find a write up of this chart anywhere. It's so good. Too bad he died in that connected scatterplot accident so we'll never know.
The older I get the more I think @danz68.bsky.social might have been right about everything.
OMG #visualized will be back!! Visualized share.google/tOOaw9XSEVa4...
Kill Mother Fucking Depeche Mode will never not be funny.
Disney is just setting the table to create their own AI slop and they want monopoly control over anything they ever so much as glanced at throughout the history of the universe.
I think it goes farther back, to the Enlightenment discarding hermeneutics as a religious activity and striving to create a world of pure reason, though death of the author is probably more visible to our modern fan-centric culture (probably because the quasi-religious we treat authors).
So wild to me that the most unimaginative logical positivists (Silicon Valley tech companies) created the most pure form of postmodern text (LLMs) that’s hated by self-identified postmodernists (academics) because it problemitizes objective truth (something no one believes in anymore). #hermeneutics
Pretty sure that's a Paul Simon lyric.
It's a weird fucking world, man.
I wonder if we could use one of those online relationship success diagrams to map, like, clickstream data or something.
Thread: 1. Signal was a photo and army magazine published by the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany from 1940 through 1945. These maps and infographics are from the Hungarian edition.
Sankey diagrams are getting perilously close to being renamed online relationship success diagrams.
What is #dataviz animation good for? An updated thread with examples.
Reminder that the pope is catholic and west point is part of the military-industrial complex. Of course a military academy for producing military leaders of an imperial military is supposed to indoctrinate what do you think indoctrination is? What do words even mean any more?
Bar charts and line charts... Even in an alternate reality populated by aliens and vampires the best we can do is bar charts.
Have you never seen several pickled banana slugs on a martini, SCOTT?
I'm definitely not the first person to do it. Here's a version for the Mississippi.
I started programmatically with the topojson using some old ORBIS code I wanted to revisit but then I did the finishing touches in Inkscape to make the spacing and some of the direction use the space better.
For #EarthDay I made a subway map version of the San Lorenzo River watershed. The San Lorenzo River is my local river here in Santa Cruz and I've always felt a greater connection to nature and the Earth when I've created abstract representations of its systems.
That will be a sad and interesting 14 milliseconds.
I love that we accept charts like the one on the left at face value when the one on the right exist.
You're absolutely right, it's the "ritual object" of modern discourse. If you're not familiar, if any archaeologist says something is a "ritual object" that's their way of saying they don't really know what it's used for.
Great list of examples!
Looks like I'm going to get to revisit design principles for animated #dataviz. Any good resources out there that folks rely on for animation in data visualization? emeeks.github.io/gestaltdatav... emeeks.github.io/gestaltdatav...
Github is developing the #dataviz section of their design system. I particularly like the practical approach taken in the color section where it acknowledges that traditional accessibility issues simply cannot be addressed in viz using non-viz UI approaches. primer.style/product/ui-p...
Okay, I believe the evidence that we can't make a $600 iPhone in the United States but now you're telling me we can't affordably make a $40,000 bag?
Please if you're an academic thinking about how you might restore academia after this, take the time to see how university's hollowing themselves out (grade inflation, PhD overproduction, administrative bloat, taking advantage of adjuncts, investment banking) made them so vulnerable to this attack.
I ignored a siren in Oklahoma City once went into a Target to buy a coffee and the person asked me why I wasn't in a shelter and I said this kind of thing probably happened all the time and they looked at me like I was crazy and it was this E5 tornado whoops. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Mo...
It's clear dataviz is at an inflection point. Essays by @shirleywu.studio and @moritzstefaner.bsky.social have been thought provoking in many ways, but haven't discussed dataviz from a business perspective. Let's discuss! Full essay: www.linkedin.com/pulse/word-d...
Kind of appropriate entry for a bucket list considering the possible effects.
Gain hands-on experience and learn data viz best practices at Outlier 2025. Early bird rates end on April 30. Register here: buff.ly/bUQHpFY
To be fair the one law he broke was to march on the Roman homeland with an army loyal personally to him, it's not like he didn't satisfy the Emoluments Clause or did insider trading.
If could benefit from even the slightest thought about how to design the experience it's so weird that it's just this way when you know it was some ESRI engineer putting it in offhand without even asking anyone and everyone has copied it since then forever.
Yes but they don't have to be random. It could walk through a list of colors rather than just pick any random RGB value.
Especially in the beginning as I'm fiddling with new shapefiles I hate that sometimes it's purple and sometimes it's blue like seriously just be blue for the first one and orange for the second and tableau palette on through and stop rolling a die every time I load some data QGIS ffs.
Why does @qgis.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy randomize the color of the layer when you load it? ArcGIS used to do this, too, right? Is it just a sort of hack to prevent the same color being used? But it's unpredictable. And weird. And jarring. Who decided it should happen this way?
I remember talking to @jasonforrest.bsky.social six years ago about making a magazine and then working with Medium and all the editing and it's so amazing to see how he grew it from nothing to this great resource for the #dataviz community! Thank you, Jason! nightingaledvs.com/my-6-years-a...
Needs more cowpie.
behold the CONNECTED SPLATTERPIE kneel before my works, ye mighty, and despair
This very much resonates with my experience. I would love if we could figure out a way to explore this and quantify it.
HN comments for @shirleywu.studio's last blog provide a fascinating glimpse into the minds of definitely non-datavis people: Datavis is done, simplicity should be everything, web as a platform was a bad idea... Is this what potential clients think? Is this where the crisis in datavis comes from?
I'd always heard it referred to as Memphis Brutalism. I should read more. Or have the AI read things to me. Or maybe never read again!
That's beautiful.
If you're a dweeb, maybe!
BRB gonna go STUDIO TULP style all the iconic pictures of the last century.
I see what you mean. It's almost like a cubist odalisque in a way. The AI is just an artist that I'm trying to force to do data visualization, no wonder it struggles.
The city or the design movement?
As AI gums up your entire life with anime knockoff versions of every meaningful image you ever saw remember that it's still just as shitty at #dataviz.
You can get my book even though it still says "pre-order"! press.princeton.edu/books/paperb... (for a 30% discount, use code P327 on the PU Press website)!
two weeks ago I published www.shirleywu.studio/notebook/202... re: plateau in innovation I've felt in #dataviz last few years. I've been furiously working on the follow-up (so many thoughts!) & it'll finally be out next Monday 🎉 if you'd like an email notification: www.shirleywu.studio/notebook
“The carousel of progress has actually been dismantled.” @infowetrust.com at his launch of the remastered edition of Info We Trust.
That's it folks, the AI will be unstoppable now.
My theory is that constructing an interesting story is a different sort of planning problem than writing a computer program (which these models are good at), because a story is *intentionally incomplete.* As @vtobin.bsky.social argues in Elements of Surprise, a story is actually a confidence game. +
I'll be there!
In talking to @wcareri.com we came up with the ultimate way to filter out AI written content: Ask them to include some diagrams that relate to the points they're making in the piece. Because AI can't make good diagrams, it acts as an excellent filter.
I like this idea immensely. By seeing the rate of change over the time period of the chart it lets you isolate on just that value more about its velocity at different parts.
I wrote something on the state of and outlook for indie dataviz. "Crisis? What crisis? — Why 2024 was a dead year for indie dataviz — and how we’ll do much better in 2025" truth-and-beauty.net/texts/crisis...
US counties are so dumb...
Giuliani, Eric Adams, Donald Trump—New York real estate and politics (what’s the difference right?) really is just cartoonishly corrupt isn’t it?
If you know anyone who wants to write about their experience with the closing of 538 for the @datavizsociety.bsky.social's magazine, please get in touch.
Would you (and others!) be interested in running or being part of a working group to address this topic and maybe we can publish a white paper at @datavizsociety.bsky.social?
Found it! medium.economist.com/mistakes-wev... Second example: Fit as a butcher's dog.
Remember to be careful when you use a multiaxis chart that the axes are not so completely out of alignment that you unintentionally tell a story with the data in a way that draws lessons from events that only happen 3 or fewer times a decade.
ChatGPT knows how to read connected scatterplots. That's more than I can say for most of you...
But with AI, I can describe where not how, too. The examples we had with Noteable were very loose and non-expert-oriented and worked out very well. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Myea...
Maybe we can heal the rift in our country via our shared hatred of Nate Silver. Cool chart though (that someone else made).
Well... when you hail a taxi you're driving via voice commands so I think there's some application for it but not in the way people are envisioning given its current limitations.
The thing is, maps are already structured data so you don't need to go through the transformer process, you can use more traditional ML approaches to identify anomalies and insights. I can't even imagine what GenAI does in that case other than translate natural language into commands.
I assume eventually someone will make a diagrammatical model that understands topological relationships along with cartesian ones but until then unless you can map it to structured text then you're wasting your time. To be clear: There are better ways to do that taking advantage of stuff like JSON.
You're not missing anything. It's good when it has code to train on so... great at making tutorial matplotlib bar charts and D3 line charts and it's absolutely terrible at anything else. It has no diagrammatic conceptualization so it can neither properly design or read anything but simple charts.
#Outlier2025 speaker applications are now open! Apply by March 15 for a chance to speak in front of a global audience of data visualizers. Apply now: https://forms.gle/1P5bJdbHbvY9zpoj9
Monochromaticking!
Concerning!
Troubling!
The quote tweet is such trash it's either dunking or some kind of pap that basically means "I like this!" and you do it because you don't want to get buried in the replies and you want your name on what is essentially a retweet.
Are you willing to inevitably suffer a horrible fate by the end of the movie or book?
Netflix still has a staff of highly paid and highly placed engineers who work on bespoke data visualization.
I want a dataviz academy with Nathan as its Defense Against the Dark Charts professor.
For a glimmer of optimism, I want to think that in a world where: - the tools we use to create #dataviz are more accessible - we engage with data more in our daily lives - creative and community forms are more celebrated ...there is opportunity. www.datavisualizationsociety.org/fourth-wave
Baseline: Unsustainable growth, global inequality, rampant materialism, total alienation, runaway climate change, rampant financial corruption, imperial warfare, massive debt, embarrassingly bad education, ludicrously out-of-budget social programs, militarized police, shitty movies, dead internet...
I always loved this piece because it had the big showy generative viz with the landscape (which is as amazing as it is heartbreaking) but then it also included these beautifully designed "traditional" charts.
I'm very bitter about recent political events, which has rubbed many of you the wrong way, and I get that. Here's my offer for a future: We invest in teaching people how to understand data and make them better stewards of their own data-driven lives and societies. nightingaledvs.com/fourth-wave-...
