I think it’s always worth revisiting accomplishments like this—it’s absolutely astounding that we don’t even think about polio (or smallpox!) in our day-to-day lives, when just two generations ago it was something that directly affected everybody.
The annual number of people paralyzed by polio was reduced by over 99% in the last four decades.
There are some beautiful illustrations in this online exhibition of data visualisation in the past few hundred years.
I must admit I’ve been wincing a little every time I see a graph with a logarithmic scale in a news article about COVID-19. It takes quite a bit of cognitive work to translate to a linear scale and get the real story.
Correlation does not imply causation.
How cartography made early modern global trade possible.
Maps and legends. Beautiful!
Tom makes an endpoint for generating QR codes so you don’t have to rely on the Google Charts API.
He also provides a good definition of “serverless”:
Now, serverless is a very silly buzzword dreamed up by someone from the consultant class who love coming up with terrible names, so I promise I won’t use it any further. Your code obviously run on a server. It just means it runs on a server someone else manages.
Amazon call it a ‘Lambda Function’. Google call it a ‘Cloud Function’. Microsoft Azure call it simply a ‘Function’. But none of those are very descriptive, because, well, anyone who writes any kind of programming language generally writes functions pretty much all the time in much the same way as anyone who writes English writes paragraphs, and we don’t call our blogging software “Cloud Paragraphs”. (Someone will now, I’m guessing.)
These diagrams of early networks feel like manuscripts that you’d half expect to be marked with “Here be dragons” at the edges.
You know what I like? Print stylesheets!
I mean, I’m not a huge fan of trying to get the damn things to work consistently—thanks, browsers—but I love the fact that they exist (athough I’ve come across a worrying number of web developers who weren’t aware of their existence). Print stylesheets are one more example of the assumption-puncturing nature of the web: don’t assume that everyone will be reading your content on a screen. News articles, blog posts, recipes, lyrics …there are many situations where a well-considered print stylesheet can make all the difference to the overall experience.
You know what I don’t like? QR codes!
It’s not because they’re ugly, or because they’ve been over-used by the advertising industry in completely inapropriate ways. No, I don’t like QR codes because they aren’t an open standard. Still, I must grudgingly admit that they’re a convenient way of providing a shortcut to a URL (albeit a completely opaque one—you never know if it’s actually going to take you to the URL it promises or to a Rick Astley video). And now that the parsing of QR codes is built into iOS without the need for any additional application, the barrier to usage is lower than ever.
So much as I might grit my teeth, QR codes and print stylesheets make for good bedfellows.
I picked up a handy tip from a Smashing Magazine article about print stylesheets a few years back. You can the combination of a @media print and generated content to provide a QR code for the URL of the page being printed out. Google’s Chart API provides a really handy shortcut for generating QR codes:
https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=150x150&chl=http://example.com
Except that there’s no telling how long that will continue to work. Google being Google, they’ve deprecated the simple image chart API in favour of the over-engineered JavaScript alternative. So just as I recently had to migrate all my maps over to Leaflet when Google changed their Maps API from under the feet of developers, the clock is ticking on when I’ll have to find an alternative to the Image Charts API.
For now, I’ve got the QR code generation happening on The Session for individual discussions, events, recordings, sessions, and tunes. For the tunes, there’s also a separate URL for each setting of a tune, specifically for printing out. I’ve added a QR code there too.
I’ve been thinking about another potential use for QR codes. I’m preparing a new talk for An Event Apart Seattle. The talk is going to be quite practical—for a change—and I’m going to be encouraging people to visit some URLs. It might be fun to include the biggest possible QR code on a slide.
I’d better generate the images before Google shuts down that API.
I quite like Phil’s idea of having charts like this. It might be a fun project for Homebrew Website Club to do something like this for my site.
A blog dedicated to data visualisation, all part of ongoing research for a book on Charles-Joseph Minard.
Data visualisation, interactive media and computational design are one focus of my work, but I also do research in the history of maps and diagrams.
These are beautiful!
Featured below is a chronology of various attempts through the last four centuries to visually organise and make sense of colour.
A JavaScript library for displaying charts’n’graphs.
Refresh to get a new randomly generated constellation.
A lovely bit of creative JS from Emily
This could be a handy replacement for some Google Charts images of graphs. It uses SVG and is responsive by default.
I bet it wouldn’t be too tricky to use this to make some sparklines.
What a lovely bit of progressive enhancement—styling data tables to display as charts.
A nice little pattern for generating a swish timeline in SVG from a plain ol’ definition list in HTML.
Beautiful visualisations of science and nature.
Made with love by a designer with a molecular biology degree.
Remember when I made that canvas sparkline script? Remember when Stuart grant my wish for an SVG version? Well, now Tom has gone one further and created a hosted version on sparksvg.me
Not a fan of sparklines? Bars and circles are also available.
I like sparklines a lot. Tufte describes a sparkline as:
…a small intense, simple, word-sized graphic with typographic resolution.
Four years ago, I added sparklines to Huffduffer using Google’s chart API. That API comes in two flavours: a JavaScript API for client-side creation of graphs, and image charts for server-side rendering of charts as PNGs.
The image API is really useful: there’s no reliance on JavaScript, it works in every browser capable of displaying images, and it’s really flexible and customisable. Therefore it is, of course, being deprecated.
The death warrant for Google image charts sets the execution date for 2015. Time to start looking for an alternative.
I couldn’t find a direct equivalent to the functionality that Google provides i.e. generating the images dynamically on the server. There are, however, plenty of client-side alternatives, many of them using canvas.
Most of the implementations I found were a little heavy-handed for my taste: they either required jQuery or Processing or both. I just wanted a quick little script for generating sparklines from a dataset of numbers. So I wrote my own.
I’ve put my code up on Github as Canvas Sparkline.
Here’s the JavaScript. You create a canvas element with the dimensions you want for the sparkline, then pass the ID of that element (along with your dataset) into the sparkline function:
sparkline ('canvasID', [12, 18, 13, 12, 11, 15, 17, 20, 15, 12, 8, 7, 9, 11], true);
(that final Boolean value at the end just indicates whether you want a red dot at the end of the sparkline).
The script takes care of normalising the values, so it doesn’t matter how many numbers are in the dataset or whether the range of the numbers is in the tens, hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands.
There’s plenty of room for improvement:
Feel free to fork, adapt, and improve.
The sparklines are working quite nicely, but I can’t help but feel that this isn’t the right tool for the job. Ideally, I’d like to keep using a server-side solution like Google’s image charts. But if I am going to use a client-side solution, I’m not sure that canvas is the right element. This should really be SVG: canvas is great for dynamic images and animations that need to update quite quickly, but sparklines are generally pretty static. If anyone fancies making a lightweight SVG solution for sparklines, that would be lovely.
In the meantime, you can see Canvas Sparkline in action on the member profiles at The Session, like here, here, here, or here.
Update: Ask and thou shalt receive. Check out this fantastic lightweight SVG solution from Stuart—bloody brilliant!
Mashing up Angry Birds and spreadsheets to better visualise project time-tracking.