452: quantum of sollazzo

#452: quantum of sollazzo – 11 January 2022

The data newsletter by @puntofisso.

Hello, regular readers and welcome new ones :) Happy New Year!

This is Quantum of Sollazzo, the newsletter about all things data. I am Giuseppe Sollazzo, or @puntofisso. I’ve been sending this newsletter since 2012 to be a summary of all the articles with or about data that captured my attention over the previous week. The newsletter is and will always (well, for as long as I can keep going!) be free, but you’re welcome to become a friend via the links below.

This is the traditional post-festive double-whammy newsletter. Enjoy it!

Every week I include a six-question interview with an inspiring data person. This week, I speak with Lisa Hornung, Data Insights Lead at Vivacity Labs.

Meanwhile, a former interviewee, Lisa Charlotte Muth of Datawrapper, is writing a book about the use of colour in data visualization, something that will certainly interest some of you.

Speaking of the interviews, here’s some news: I’ll soon be launching the Six Questions archive as a webpage. Watch this space.

Alex wins the data science internet with this tweet (which I’m sure you get, but in case you need a hint, here it is).

Meanwhile, using my Parli-N-Grams tool I charted the frequency of each letter of the Greek alphabet in debates at the house of Commons, using their most common pronunciation/spelling. Yes, Omicron is beating Delta.

‘till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso

Six questions to...

Lisa Hornung

Lisa is Data Insights Lead at Vivacity Labs .

What is your daily data work like and what tools do you use?

The type of data and tools I work with usually varies by project. If I have to deal with lots of data or advanced analysis is needed, I do most of the data cleaning and analysis in python, but sometimes Excel is the better choice. For example, when it’s a one off project or colleagues with no coding experience are involved. The visualisation tool and outputs also vary by project. For dashboards I use Google Data Studio or Tableau, Datawrapper for quick interactive charts (and maps), Excel for static reports, QGIS for custom maps and Illustrator for highly customised visuals.

Tell me about a data project that you're proud of...

When I was managing the UK Civil Society Almanac, an annual statistical publication on UK charities, I led a redesign project to improve the way we communicate findings. Based on user research we changed the structure of the report and offered further data downloads. It doesn’t feel super innovative today but I was very pleased when we launched with a new website and improved data visualisations in 2019. And it was great to see how our data was used to inform a Covid-19 emergency funding package of charities in 2020.

...and a data project that someone else did and you're jealous of.

Oh there are so many, but I really admire when people create useful tools for the community. For example, my former colleague David Kane built a number of tools like FindThatPostcode or FindThatCharity to help make official datasets more accessible. Another more creative tool I really like is Plotparade by Krisztina Szűcs.

If I say "dataset", you think of...

• A table – even though I work with all sorts of data these days (e.g. geo data, webpages, text), I still think of data mostly as a table.
• Yay, new things to discover – a new dataset is always super exciting and fun to explore.
• Hopefully the data collection person knew what they were doing – while exciting, new data often means messy data and lots of cleaning before you actually get to the more interesting parts.

Give someone new to data a tip or lesson you wish you'd learned earlier.

Working in data means you’re constantly learning. Sometimes it can feel overwhelming when you are a data analyst (engineer, scientist, visualisation designer, …) because there are so many different tools (and techniques) out there and the field is always evolving. When I get frustrated or feel like an imposter, I try to remember that it’s all about the ride. That way I can enjoy learning new things and take it as a positive challenge rather than focus too much on the outcome. Reading about other people’s experience in this area is helpful too.

Data is or data are...

Definitely is! It just sounds better.

Topical

2021 chart reviews

There’s quite a few interesting ones out there, including the New York Times’s, Axios’s,FiveThirtyEight’s, and Bloomberg’s.

Omicron thread

John Burn-Murdoch’s first thread of 2021 is all about the Omicron variant. Elsewhere in the Financial Times, this article sheds some light on the efficacy of lateral flow tests (or lack thereof).

Bitcoin private key is on this website

“On this site you can try your luck and try to find a bitcoin wallet with a non-zero balance on it. But you know, this is almost impossible. If you still want to try to find a wallet, click the button below.“
All good with crypto until someone randomly finds it (ok, it’s close to impossible given the size of the search space, but…)

A wave of words

“The coronavirus era has a vocabulary all its own: brand-new coinages, jargon we suddenly all know, and everyday words with new meanings. Over the past two years, these linguistic developments have seemed to echo the course of the pandemic itself. The first weeks of “flattening the curve” gave way to a spring of “anti-mask” and “remote work”; this summer was more about “variant” and “vaccination.”“
Visualized by Datawrapper.

Erasmus a dos velocidades

An excellent set of visualizations of the Erasmus exchange programme (the accompanying article is in Spanish, but the automatic translation into English works ok).

The state of play of COVID, globally

Francesco Piccinelli does some data wrangling about the global state of COVID.

Tools & Tutorials

How we chart the news of the year

Nice explainer in The Economist’s Off the Charts newsletter.

changedetection.io

A “self-hosted open source website change detection monitoring and notification service.“

Geocomputation with R

An openly-licensed book on geographic data analysis, visualization and modeling by transport analysis supremo Robin Lovelace and colleagues..

Jupyter Games

Apparently Jupyter can be used to develop tiny games.

RAIL MAP online

Interactive map of the UK and Ireland’s railways, past and present. The same website also offers maps of the US West Railroads, and of UK & Irish Canals.

Data thinking

Do No Harm Guide: Applying Equity Awareness in Data Visualization

How to use data without causing harm, in a Hippocratic fashion.

Thus spake Vitalik

A “mini-tweetstorm of some of the things I’ve said and written over the past decade, and what I think about those subjects today”, by Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin.

Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive

100 Beautiful and Informative Notebooks of 2021

This is a great collection of Observable notebooks from 2021.

SLAVERY & RESISTANCE IN NYC (1626-1865)

A walking tour.

Science visualization trends of 2021

A collection of visualizations from academic publications. Not as polished as most data journalism, these days, but still something to ponder about.

Europe in the XIX. century

Historical maps made interactive.

AI

Managed by Bots: surveillance of gig economy workers

“PI, Worker Info Exchange, and App Drivers and Couriers Union have teamed up to challenge the unprecedented surveillance that gig economy workers are facing from their employers.“

Hydraulic haemorrhage

“No piece of art has ever emotionally affected me the way this robot arm piece has. It’s programmed to try to contain the hydraulic fluid that’s constantly leaking out and required to keep itself running…if too much escapes, it will die so it’s desperately trying to pull it back to continue to fight for another day“
Found by chance on Facebook.

quantum of sollazzo is also 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.