On the power of visual storytelling
Data
Curious
2020.03.23
We are entering, for many of us, uncharted territory.
We are staying at home (hopefully). We are having more video calls. We are trying to cope with the relentless onslaught of COVID-19 news, updates, infection rates, etc.
This is, what some might call, a big transition. It takes a toll on the body and the mind. And this past week, as I trawled through the many, many incredible pieces of visual journalism looking for links to share, I felt the weight of anxiety settling in.
There are many great resources popping up on the internet we can learn from. I even started a blog article to track the most important COVID-19 articles for now.
But that also means it's important to know when to shut it off for a while.
This week I'm including a shorter, more minimal edition of the newsletter: only the best, most essential data visualization and development links that might be useful this week.
Maybe in the coming weeks, less will be more.
Stay safe out there,
- Ben
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Read
This is why your newsroom needs a graphics team
If you read this newsletter, you've likely seen the coronavirus simulation story by the Washinton Post that went viral last week. Alberto Cairo wrote a short but insightful blog post on the impact of this story—by the end of the week, a data visualization story was the most read story on the WaPo website ever. This is the power of visual storytelling with data.
Thirteen things to visualize about COVID-19 besides caseloads
Andy Krackov wrote an article on Medium outlining some other metrics we should be paying attention to besides total number of cases.
Explore
How the Virus Got Out
The NYT graphics team released a comprehensive piece of scrollytelling that visualizes how the virus escaped from Wuhan into the rest of the world. The amount of development and data wrangling that went into this piece is staggering. It also gives me very strong "monster from Stranger Things vibes" at times, which I must say, is a very nice effect.
Learn
Build an interactive dashboard in 50 lines of code
A nice intro to using Streamlit for creating lightweight data viz apps in Python.
Interactive data visualization with Altair
One of the better tutorials and intros to Altair, my current favorite library for data viz in Python.
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