Bookmarked Cytoscape: An Open Source Platform for Complex Network Analysis and Visualization (cytoscape.org)
Cytoscape is an open source software platform for visualizing complex networks and integrating these with any type of attribute data. A lot of Apps are available for various kinds of problem domains, including bioinformatics, social network analysis, and semantic web.
Watched Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes from The Joy of Stats - BBC Four | YouTube

Hans Rosling's famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport's commentator's style to reveal the story of the world's past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before - using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of 'The Joy of Stats' he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.

More about this programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wgq0l

I really love the visualizations here! There’s so much to pull apart and analyze. I do wish I had a more focused view on some of the time lapse. There are some countries moving around in interesting ways and I’d love to be able to watch what they’re doing and match them up with various historical events. Watching Japan, for example is fascinating. The near-global dip for large portions of the connected world in 1918 was particularly interesting to see as well.

👓 The Mueller report redactions, explained in 4 charts | Vox

Read The Mueller report redactions, explained in 4 charts by Alvin Chang (Vox)
We can’t see behind the bars. But we can see where they are — and why they’re there.

👓 See How Much Of The Mueller Report Is Redacted | NPR

Read See How Much Of The Mueller Report Is Redacted by Ryan Lucas, Alyson Hurt, Thomas Wilburn (NPR)
Attorney General William Barr explained before the release of the special counsel report that the law and regulations kept him from including everything that Robert Mueller uncovered, as well as how.

Sparklines of recent activity on my website

Inspired a bit by the work of Jeremy Keith and others, I’ve recently been playing around with some sparklines on my website. While tinkering around with things, mostly on the back end of my site, I’ve tried out several WordPress-specific plugins, both to see how they’re built and the user interfaces they provide. 

There are several simple plugins for adding sparklines to WordPress websites including:

  • Activity Sparks plugin by Greg Jackson which adds some configurable functionality for adding sparklines to WordPress sites including for posts and comments as well as for tracking categories/tags.
  • Sparkplug by Beau Lebens has similarity to the Activity Sparks plugin (above), but with a slightly older looking and somewhat less refined output.

At present, I’m using the Activity Sparks plugin in my sidebar to display the recent activity on my site in terms of my posting frequency and the comment frequency. One chart provides the daily activity on my site over the past 3 months while the other provides the monthly activity over the past 5 years.

When on particular category pages, you can see the posting velocity for those particular categories in these respective time periods. While on the homepage and other miscellaneous pages, you can see the aggregate numbers for the website.

Generally I don’t care very much about the statistics, but in aggregate they can sometimes be fun to look at. As quick examples, I can tell roughly by looking at the 5 year time span when I added certain posting features to my website or that time my site got taken down by HackerNews.


hat tip to Khürt Williams who reminded me I needed to circle back around and finish of a small piece of this project and document it.

❤️ randal_olson tweeted 10 most populous cities in the world from 1500-2018. #dataviz https://t.co/vtGEBVLdYk https://t.co/uvIkuE4VDI

Liked a tweet by Randy Olson Randy Olson (Twitter)

👓 UK Journalists on Twitter | OUseful.Info, the blog

Read UK Journalists on Twitter by Tony Hirst (OUseful.Info)
A post on the Guardian Datablog earlier today took a dataset collected by the Tweetminster folk and graphed the sorts of thing that journalists tweet about ( Journalists on Twitter: how do Britain&…

👓 Every time Ford and Kavanaugh dodged a question, in one chart | Vox

Read Every time Ford and Kavanaugh dodged a question, in one chart by Alvin Chang (Vox)
There was a striking difference in style — and substance.
An impressively telling visualization here.

👓 Squares and prettier graphs | Stuart Landridge

Read Squares and prettier graphs by Stuart Landridge (kryogenix.org)
The Futility Closet people recently posted “A Square Circle“, in which they showed: 49² + 73² = 7730 77² + 30² = 6829 68² + 29² = 5465 54² + 65² = 7141 71² + 41² = 6722 67² + 22² = 4973 which is a nice little result. I like this sort of recreational maths, so I spent a little time w...
An interesting cyclic structure here.

👓 How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk | The New York Times

Read How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk by Josh Katz (nytimes.com)
What does the way you speak say about where you’re from? Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map.
I’d love to see the data sets and sources they used for these visualizations.

Data mining the New York Philharmonic performance history

Read Data mining the New York Philharmonic performance history by Kris Shaffer (pushpullfork.com)

How does war affect the music an orchestra plays

The New York Philharmonic has a public dataset containing metadata for their entire performance history. I recently discovered this, and of course downloaded it and started to geek out over it. (On what was supposed to be a day off, of course!) I only explored the data for a few hours, but was able to find some really interesting things. I’m sharing them here, along with the code I used to do them (in R, using TidyVerse tools), so you can reproduce them, or dive further into other questions. (If you just want to see the results, feel free to skip over the code and just check out the visualizations and discussion below.)

All scripts, extracted data, and visualizations in this blog post can also be found in the GitHub repository for this project.

Banner image by Tim Hynes.

Chris Aldrich is reading “10 Great Last.fm Apps, Hacks and Mashups”

Read 10 great Last.fm apps, hacks and mashups (The Next Web)
A look at some of the best apps, hacks and mashups available for music streaming and scrobbling service Last.fm.
Curious about alternatives Last.fm’s broken RSS feeds and what people are doing with their listening data. Some relatively interesting ideas in here, but nothing earth shattering. One or two were focused on visualization, but otherwise nothing I felt I could use.