435: quantum of sollazzo
#435: quantum of sollazzo – 17 August 2021
The data newsletter by @puntofisso.
Hello, regular readers and welcome, new subscribers! :)
This is Quantum of Sollazzo, the newsletter about all things data and I am Giuseppe Sollazzo, or @puntofisso. I've been sending this newsletter since 2012 as a summary of all the articles with or about data that captured my attention over the previous week. The newsletter is free (but you're welcome to become a friend via the links below).
Excitingly, yours truly was mentioned by The Economist's data journalist Marie Segger in her appearance on the Conversations with Data podcast. You should totally read her recent Off The Charts newsletter with some great insight on decluttering charts.
Every week I include a six-question interview with an inspiring data person. This week, I speak with Neil Richards, who's been gifting the Twittersphere with some awesome Tableau charts over the past few years.
'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso
Six questions to...
Neil Richards
Neil is EMEA BI Lead at JLL.
What is your daily data work like and what tools do you use?
My daily work is mostly creating Tableau BI dashboards at JLL with a bit of project management thrown in, though I also love elements of the job that involve growing the internal data community and promoting data literacy. But I’m probably better known online for my personal projects on Tableau Public or my blog at questionsindataviz.com - once I’m outside the environs of the day job I love to be a bit more creative and unconventional.
Tell me about a data project that you're proud of...
Most of my data projects are on my Tableau Public profile here - in particular my most recent project (at time of submitting answers!) is here - I had a lot of fun with this one basically just designing a new map from scratch and I’m pretty pleased the way it came out
...and a data project that someone else did and you're jealous of.
Where do I start?! So many to choose from but I’m going to go with OddityViz by Valentina d’Efilippo and Miriam Quick. I love how Miriam sees music in data and data in music (I couldn’t think which way round that was, but it’s definitely both!). And then with Valentina’s visual creativity it’s a perfect partnership!
If I say "dataset", you think of...
"Ooh - new project!" Sounds pretentious but the dataset is what I use as a creative medium, precisely because I have no talent in wielding a pencil, moulding clay … or indeed anything conventionally artistic or creative. So a new dataset is a chance for a brand-new visual creation (of course, that’s the “rose-tinted” glasses view that assumes it’s clean, interesting and packed full of amazing untold stories!)
Give someone new to data a tip or lesson you wish you'd learned earlier.
Don’t be put off or overwhelmed by what you see others create - just dive in and enjoy the process, the more “fun” the project is to you, for whatever reason, the faster you’ll learn. Oh, and it’s “CHORopleth” - there’s no L in it. Took me years to realise I had that one wrong!
Data is or data are...
Definitely Data is. I know it's a plural noun in Latin, but its derivation is just like “agenda”, so it’s singular in English. Though to be fair I can tolerate either - just so long as you don’t pronounce it “dah-ta”!
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Topical
Graphic illustration of a world map and airplanes flying between pointsInternational Travel During Covid-19: Where Can You Go and Which Destinations Are Still Sealed Off
Beyond everything else, this highly visual article by Bloomberg could be pretty useful if you want to travel! Methodology notes are included.
Colin Angus on recent COVID-19 data...
"After promising falls in COVID cases in recent weeks, numbers have started to tick back up again in all four UK nations.
But what does the mortality data tell us about the impact of the delta wave so far on deaths across the UK?"
One of those brilliant, illustrated Twitter thread with data analysis by researcher Colin Angus.
Climate Scientists Reach ‘Unequivocal’ Consensus on Human-Made Warming in Landmark Report
"The first major assessment from the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in nearly a decade sees no end to rising temperatures before 2050."
An interesting look at the IPCC report by Bloomberg, with some pretty good graphics.
Dressel vs. Phelps. McLaughlin vs. Muhammad. Visualizing Olympic Champions, Present vs. Past
The usual great dataviz by the New York Times, this time including animations.
Tools & Tutorials
EU Twinnings
EU Twinnings is a website that allows you to explore the similarity between European regions using Eurostat data.
(Ok, this is an old one and a blatant self-advertisement. But oddly I didn't have much to link and there might be some news soon about this once-finalist of the EU Datathon. Any idea on how I could improve it is very welcome!)
Data thinking
Free to view online newspaper released from the British Library
As Terence Eden notes on Twitter, "The British Library keeps to a ‘safe date’ when determining when a newspaper can be considered to be entirely out-of-copyright, which is 140 years after the date of publication.", which feels a tad long.
This comes from this announcement about the release of 19th century newspapers.
The Art of Nomography
"Prior to the widespread of computers, graphic calculation methods were a popular means of quickly solving scientific and technical problems, that would otherwise have required tedious calculations. This is distinct from graphical representation of data obtained numerically using computers, that we widely use today, for illustration purposes and to get a qualitative “feeling” of the behaviour of physical quantities as a function of some parameters."
Basically, nomographs were a way to use graphics in order to derive data, which is conceptually exactly the opposite of data visualization.
Dataviz & Interactive
How global are the Olympic Games?
An interactive Tableau dataviz by this week's interviewee Neil Richards.
Where do the players come from?
Quantum of Sollazzo past interviewee Topi Tjukanov has created this pretty cool map that shows where all the players of the UEFA 2020 tournament were born, based on Wikidata.
Native Land
A fantastic map of indigenous lands, which I've just realised had been already covered by Jeremy Singer-Vine in the 24/06/2020 issue of his "Data Is Plural" newsletter (which I warmly recommend).
"We strive to map Indigenous lands in a way that changes, challenges, and improves the way people see the history of their countries and peoples."
Asylum statistics
From the Commons Library, this thorough report by Georgina Sturge includes the fantastic chart below.
(h/t Chris Tomlinson)
AI
To better understand the ethics of machine learning datasets...
"We picked three controversial face recognition / person recognition datasets". Very in-depth Twitter thread by Princeton's Professor Arvind Narayanan, which summarises their results into dataset bias research (and shows bad retraction practice).
How TikTok's Algorithm Figures You Out
A short video explainer by the Wall Street Journa. A bit scary, to be honest.
quantum of sollazzo is supported by ProofRed's excellent proofreading service. If you need high-quality copy editing or proofreading, head to http://proofred.co.uk. Oh, they also make really good explainer videos.
