Hello chart-lovers.

I took a few weeks off as I was busy watching lots of movies at the Sydney Film Festival. It was fantastic - will do again next year.

There has been what feels like a lot of rain recently. But is it a lot more than usual for the Sydney area? I decided to look up the data available from the Bureau of Meteorology and have a dig around. I know that there are periods that have broken records in areas across the state this year (well, according to Tom Saunders - my weather guy on ABC NSW), but what about Sydney. The data I extracted gives me total rainfall for a month, collected at the Botanic Gardens from January 1885 up until May 2024.

The Sydney Film Festival starts at the end of the week. I’m seeing eight films over the two weeks and I’m really looking forward to it.

I made a scraper and got all the different genre tags using rvest and made a few little triangles that are sort of inspired by projector beams. It honestly was all I had in me after compiling the data. The “height” of the beam is the number of films linked to that genre, and I built them using geom_segment - the topline started at x at a point made with max/2 and the yend going up to the max point and the bottom line starting at the same point but down the the min (always 1). I exported an svg into Illustrator and filled in the traingles and tidied up the layout. Yes, this could have been a bar chart, but where is the fun in that?

Expect more SFF next week - I’d like to look a bit more at some combos. Maybe a correlation map of genres most associated with one and other? Maybe at individual films…I’m not sure. All I know if that I have to stop compiling my data late Sunday afternoon so I have more than an hour to make the visualisation.

I’m revisiting a past subject again. It’s back to colour and Grace Cossington-Smith from a few weeks ago. I expanded the colour range a bit more, and used the histogram data to work out proportions of colour for each work. It was lovely to hear from some people when I looked at her work in week 5. Someone lives very close to Grace Cossington-Smith’s old house, and her kids did a little excursion to see the house and see her work at AGNSW. Some of you also told me that her work was also a favourite at AGNSW and you also swing by to say “hello art!” when you are there.

Used my trusty tools of ImageMagik, R/ggplot and Illustrator. I spent a really long time in front of a computer screen this week at work, so left this to the very last minute tonight. Most of today I spent mending things. It was nice to do things with my hands, as well as shift a few big things in the mending pile.

Next week I hope to do something related to the upcoming Sydney Film Festival. It’s my first “serious” festival attendance, with the purchase of a ticket pack. A friend at work encouraged me to go along, and I am very grateful for the encouragement. I’ve always found the program a bit overwhelming, and really have only gone if someone had already bought the tickets, or if I picked one movie I wanted to see. I’m quite excited to go. I’ve really been getting into seeing films again at the cinema since NYE 2022/23 when my friend said her resolution was to start going more often, and we agreed to see a movie together every month. Since then I really have caught the bug, and see a few more movies a month, on top of our regular “movie club”. So doing something with SFF data seemed like an interesting idea. I have the data structure in my head, but I still haven’t had time to think properly about how to visualise it. It was originally going to be what I tackled this week, but I really needed a bit of a break from computers.

There are 2,106 species of plants and animals on the threatened species list in Australia, and just over 50% of these are a class of flowering plants called Magnoliopsida. Wattle, Banksia, Baronia, Quandong, Gums, Grevillea…all of these beautiful plants that I get a lot of enjoyment from every day are in trouble. The chart for week 6 revisits the data set I used back in Week 1. Because I am still open-mouthed that so many threatened species fall under the Magnoliopsida umbrella. There are thirty eight entire families of Magnoliopsida that are critically endangered - with many species that sit underneath that.

I used the tidyverse to wrangle and organise my data and prepare a base chart, that I exported took into Illustrator. I used a tutorial by Valentina D'Efilippo on Domestika as my inspiration.

I’ve attached a PDF so you can zoom right in and see the families of Magnoliopsida that we need to look out for, plant more of, and write in to our politicians and scream about. There is so much to scream about right now.

Each week I feel like I’m playing catch-up. Re-learning once familiar tools can be a bit dispiriting. This week’s newsletter looks paltry in comparison to the effort that went into making it. About 150%* of time went into getting familiar again with a fun tool called ImageMagick. It is an open source image editing tool and has some nice functions that allow you to draw out the colours used in different images. Many years ago I used it as a tool for a post-grad uni assignment. We were supposed to explore a data visualisation tool and share our findings with the class. I got marked down because the lecturer didn’t thing imageMagick was an appropriate tool for the task and to visualise information. Most people used Tableau or Excel. I took the imageMagick outputs and combined them with D3 to make some graphics showing colour breakdowns of different paintings. Fuck knows what he would have thought of my final assignment that used knitting to represent data but anyhow…

I first learnt about command line tools like imageMagick from Jon Keegan,** so when that lecturer couldn’t understand why I was using it, and looking at colour values in a data visualisation subject, while at the same time pushing his own strange views on the topic, I just shrugged my shoulders and realised that the course (which I had hung all my hopes on) was a write off, and I was better off focussing on the subjects I was taking in the design faculty, where the lecturer was all about experimenting and playing around. In his course I was looking at sonification…and knitting. All good fun!

Now, the chart this week is not a good example of what you can do by looking at colour in images. I feel that now that I have the basic tool set up and running, I can do some fun things. Any requests let me know! Do you have an artist you really love, or a set of images you think would be good to have a closer look a hit me up.

Pet Shop Boys have a new album out and it’s great. The cover feels very Gilbert and George (as well as…Colin Robertson?), and the video for the single Dancing Star (about Rudolf Nureyev) reminds me of the work of Eadweard Muybridge that visualised motion, with the broken down images of Nureyev’s beautiful, fluid dancing.

I love to listen to PSB. It reminds me of an age when we danced joyfully around the Hodern Pavillion in the late 80s and early 90s. I remember walking in to the sweaty hall on a wave of euphoria, as Left to my own Devices played, and every time I hear it now I can recall how cool the lyrics were to my young teenage brain. Debussy and Che Guevara to a disco beat, is still in my mind, one of the best lyrics of any pop song.

If you do not like to hear or see swearing, specifically the F word, then do not go any further!

At work, in our little jolly team, we have a “style guide” for GIFs posted to our chats. Meaning, we only post succession GIFs (and very occasionally The Bear). Talking to my colleague Steph over Teams about this very newsletter, I mused on what the next topic would be, and given the context of this musing, and with Succession gifs in my face, the theme became apparent.

After having a dig around, I discovered there are these files called SubRip subtitle files that are used to synch with video. The sites for these seemed ALL dodgy so it was a bit of a Hail Mary as I downloaded, and hoped to god the files were just text, but when you need to get a newsletter together, you take ALL KINDS of risks.

So this visual is not that amazing, I admit. But like most things data related, the finding, sorting, looking, exploring, cleaning etc took up 99.9% of the time I had and very late this afternoon, I got this plot done in ggplot2.

(Apologies - email updated with PDF attached)

This week I looked into the films of Sofia Coppola. I pulled together a little data set from information available on Wikipedia and Box-Office Mojo. I excluded On the Rocks as being made for appleTV, the data wasn’t really comparable.

Once I got all the data, I fired up R and standardised each of the variables. What you see are petals that are scaled from the lowest to highest value across each measure. You get an overall view of each movie, but you can also compare across the petal colours, so looking at all the pink petals (the running time), you can see the shortest and longest film (and how each compares to the average which are the grey shapes sitting behind each petal).

I love the dreamy feminised spaces that Coppola has created in some of her films. I wanted to try and create that floaty feeling with this weeks work.

This week I looked into the films of Sofia Coppola. I pulled together a little data set from information available on Wikipedia and Box-Office Mojo. I excluded On the Rocks as being made for appleTV, the data wasn’t really comparable.

Once I got all the data, I fired up R and standardised each of the variables. What you see are petals that are scaled from the lowest to highest value across each measure. You get an overall view of each movie, but you can also compare across the petal colours, so looking at all the pink petals (the running time), you can see the shortest and longest film (and how each compares to the average which are the grey shapes sitting behind each petal).

I love the dreamy feminised spaces that Coppola has created in some of her films. I wanted to try and create that floaty feeling with this weeks work.

Data is sourced from data.gov.au and shows Threatened Species and Ecological Communities of National Environmental Significance.

I've used this data set quite a lot over the years. It's updated at least once a year, and there is a lot more detail for you to go and explore if you are curious. I'm always struck by the overwhelming number of plants in danger, or nearly lost/already lost to us. Flowering plants are overwhelmingly in trouble - all those bees! All those habitats and food for animals!

Thank you so much for subscribing. If you are looking at this on your mobile, I apologise for how teeny-tiny this may look on your screen. Ive attached a PDF that you can download to zoom in and explore. Or open up on your desktop or tablet if you can, and want to have a closer look. And maybe have a look at a beautiful plant or tree where you live and give it some appreciation. It's existing in spite of us, and that resistance can be celebrated in these shitty times.

Here we go!

I’ve had this urge to start a newsletter on data visualisation for a while as a way to commit to start working on my portfolio again. I read Atomic Habits by James Clear, and really like the approach of “putting something out there”. Even if it’s average. The regular act of hitting post and not letting perfection get in the way means things get done, and build towards something bigger. Small, incremental acts are something I’ve been testing out in earnest over the past few months. Flossing my teeth daily, doing any amount of housework, updating my diary and planner each day, doing the exercises my Physio has given me to strengthen my dodgy leg. I’ve been building on these small habits each day, and each small action is leading to a bigger outcome. I feel like it’s time to take on something that’s a bit bigger, and been bugging me and making me feel extremely weird. It’s time to jump in and start to build a routine of building on the skills I want and that I can’t build through my day job anymore. What this will actually look like here is not fully formed in my mind, and that’s OK. The act of doing will help work out what this newsletter actually is. All I know is I want it to help me feel engaged in what I do, to build the skills again that I feel I’ve lost, and get a portfolio of new work together in case I need it at short notice.

Find a data set that you are passionate about and it will be easier to work on, they said.