Author Archive | Laura

time-may-change

Remembering Bowie

There may not be much of an educational application for these visualisations – except, perhaps, for music students. But nevertheless, I couldn’t let the month go by without highlighting some visualisations  to commemorate the late, great David Bowie. And, for your listening pleasure as you browse… Discography and Styles of David Bowie Source: el Mundo […]

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salary-to-buy

The Salary Needed to Buy a Home in the UK

This handy interactive viz from Go Compare shows the salary you’d need to buy a flat or house in the UK. It is useful for young people looking to get on the housing ladder, but also perhaps for students of introductory Economics who are thinking about the relationship between salary and assets, and covering concepts […]

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beneath-ny

The Rise of Multimedia Journalism

I taught Multimedia Communications courses to Journalism students, so articles like these were some of my first introductions to visualisation. I’ve been hooked ever since! Published in December 2012, many consider The New York Times’ article ‘Snow Fall’ to be the forerunner to the multimedia journalism pieces we’re now seeing. Innovative in its use of auto-playing […]

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where-are-the-jobs

Pointillist Mapping

Borrowing from the style of pointillist artists like Georges Seurat and Vincent Van Gogh, the following three maps show data overlaid on maps using a tiny dot for each data point. While it is difficult to extract quantifiable data from this type of display, it is useful as a big picture overview. Here are three pointillist […]

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daily-routines

Great Storytellers, Creative Minds

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, the just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while” – Steve Jobs I’m seeing infographics on creativity a lot recently and loving it. I’ve always had a […]

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isotype

The History of Data Viz

Cave Paintings at Lascaux (15,000 BCE) Discovered in a cave in Lascaux, France in 1940, these were painted by the paleolithic inhabitants of the area some 17,300 years ago. The paintings show animals, humans and abstract symbols. Theories suggest that these paintings could depict the results of a hunt or prehistoric star charts. Anaximander’s Map of […]

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dear-data

Hand-Drawn Visualisations: Dear Data

I’ve often thought of data visualisation as a very digital thing. In this journey I’m on, to learn how to present and analyse data visually, I’ve felt a bit let down by my lack of programming skill. I’ve always kept sketchbooks and made lists and doodled, but code is not, and I fear may never be, a […]

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who-needs-gps

Gamifying Geographic Knowledge

I won’t lie — my geographic knowledge of New York City landmarks isn’t great. Having spent a total of four days in Manhattan so far in my life, I didn’t expect a gold star on The New York Times’ recent interactive — Who Needs a GPS? A New York Geography Quiz. (and yes, I think this […]

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syrian-journey

Gamification of News

You might have played games based on real events while at school… remember Oregon Trail? Newsgames have emerged from this tradition and are usually published by journalism organizations or nonprofit groups with the intent to explore a topical issue. Given the amount of time the average western teenager spends playing video games each week, it’s an […]

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