Visualising music history, Australia's COVID19 timeline & faiths of the world
This is Edition #4 of The Datavist, a weekly newsletter highlighting great instances of data-driven storytelling in the humanities. Compiled and commented upon by Darragh Murray.
Good morning (or afternoon or evening for those not in Australia, where I write this) datavists!
Darragh Murray here again with edition four of The Datavist newsletter - your snapshot to excellence in data visualisation in the humanities. I hope you're all doing well.
I am doing great, and, as I write this, presently recovering from a long five-hour bike ride as I try to get myself back into shape following a big Christmas.
Like the true nerd that I am, I made fair use of the time - downloading my first ever Audible book, the newest edition of Davenport and Harris' classic "Competing on Analytics", a book I highly recommend to anyone interested in analytics strategy in business.
Let’s get into it. As a former music journalist and general fan of punk music, the first piece I have to share with you this week, while not 'recent', is one that seriously blows my mind.
Visualising the history of Fugazi
Carni Klirs | Self-published | 2019
I'm unsure how well known Washington D.C. punk rock band Fugazi are in mainstream music circles. Still, those who've followed U.S. punk music from the mid to late 80s onwards would undoubtedly be aware of the band's massive influence on the alternative rock and grunge in the early to mid-90s. Without bands like Fugazi, you may not have had bands like Sleater-Kinney, Pearl Jam or Nirvana (all of which name-checked the group as an influence).
Data visualisation practitioner Carni Klirs is obviously a fan, undertaking a visual history of Fugazi for a thesis project - and the results are quite incredible. It's probably the best-visualised exploration of a band's history I've seen so far.
Klirs documents Fugazi's international touring history, the venues they played within their hometown of Washington D.C, their history of activism and the 'Fugazi Family Tree', linking in all the other groups.
Klirs uses various fascinating visual elements - geomaps, radial sankey diagrams, and this peculiar visualisation depicting other bands with whom Fugazi shared stages. I'm not sure if this visual even has a name - its a combination of sankeys, bubbles on a time series. Either way, it works as an effective method to communicate Fugazi's immense history.
I'm not surprised Klirs was nominated (and I think won) an Information Is Beautiful award in 2019. I highly recommend checking out his portfolio, which is full of fascinating projects.
Anatomy of our battle against COVID-19
Inga Ting, Nathanael Scott, Alex Palmer, Katia Shatoba | ABC Digital Story Innovation Team | 25 January 2021
Alright, so perhaps we're all well and truly sick of COVID19 data visualisations. How many times have we seen those log charts of rising cases, rising deaths? But I've got one more for you that is worth your time.
"It began with a trickle that many feared would become a tsunami."
Australian readers will undoubtedly understand that we've been fortunate enough to have a terrific run with COVID-19. Relative to other countries, we've coped exceedingly well. However, it doesn't mean we do not have an interesting story to tell about our experience during 2020.
This deep dive into Australia's COVID-19 experience by data journalists at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) does a great job at visually dissecting the countries COVID-19 history to date.
I love the way cases are clustered together, with different colours used to represent known clusters of cases. The colours indicate the source of COVID19 infections, whether it be a cluster of cases, individual cases due to returned travellers or from unknown sources. Short and sharp annotations throughout the main visualisation bring you a deeper understanding of Australia's COVID-19 history. Often maligned in some circles (pun intended), bubble plots are perfect for this kind of data storytelling.
I love this visual showing how one single case can set off an explosion of other infections that permeated many aspects of Australian society.
Please read the whole thing; it's a masterpiece.
World Religion Map
@pythonmaps | Self Published | 23 January 2020
My second @pythonmaps post in two weeks, who has been incredibly active in producing many maps on different cultural and environmental aspects of our world.
While I like to think that I have a pretty good handle on what countries follow which religions, this simple map basically makes it far easier to conceptualise the nature of faith worldwide.
I'm quite the big fan of the way this person does their mapping visualisations. There is nothing super special about the visualisations per se (they're just maps in the end), but the content is well chosen.
Lucky Dip
Here's a new little section of The Datavist newsletter of interesting links that may or may not be related to the 'humanities' theme but usually involve data visualisation or some discipline sub-branch.
Andy Cotgreave digs into the recent history of COVID19 data visualisation in his piece "After 12 months of covid-19 charts, what have we learnt?" on Gravy Anecdote.
An oldie but a goodie, Amber Thomas provides a methodology for progressing ideas to full-blown data stories.
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That's all for this week! Thanks again for reading and feel free to share amongst your friends and colleagues and even random strangers.
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Otherwise, have a great week and see you next Monday!
Darragh