Data Vis Dispatch, June 29

The best of last week’s big and small data visualizations

Welcome back to the second edition of Data Vis Dispatch! Every week, we’ll be publishing a collection of the best small and large data visualizations we find, especially from news organizations — to celebrate data journalism, data visualization, simple charts, elaborate maps, and their creators.

Recurring topics for this week include record-breaking heat waves, regional elections in France, and (what else?) the pandemic.

Last week’s heat and drought continued to shatter records around the world. These maps showed not just a few days of extreme weather, but a major climate shift:

Axios: Global warming makes extreme weather a regular event, June 26
The New York Times: How Weird Is the Heat in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver? Off the Charts, June 29
Bloomberg: Drought Indicators in Western U.S. Flash Warnings of the ‘Big One,’ June 24
CNN: The West’s historic drought in 3 maps, June 24

And these charts explored progress on emissions in the UK and Russia:

The Times: Powering Britain: A visual guide, June 22
Проект [Proekt]: Страна больших труб. Атлас грязного неба над Россией, June 24

The political theme of this week was France’s regional elections, with low turnout hanging over the results:

Le Figaro: “La carte des listes arrivées en tête, commune par commune,” June 29 (Tweet)
L’Humanité: Au second tour, les électeurs désertent encore les urnes, June 28
Agence France-Presse: “Un second tour sous le signe de l’abstention,” June 24 (Tweet)
Bloomberg: Republican Rivals Emerge for Macron, Le Pen, June 28

On general topics, this week offered clean, simple charts and maps:

Financial Times: UK companies’ gender pay gap reporting drops, June 27
The Washington Post: DeJoy’s USPS slowdown plan will delay the mail. What’s it mean for your Zip code?, June 24
Bloomberg: India Shifts 50,000 Troops to China Border in Historic Move, June 27

And also some more unusual data visualizations, with a bivariate choropleth map (Adedamola Lapido), a connected, proportional area chart (The Economist), and a data visualization as tall as the entire article (ProPublica):

Adedamola Lapido: Food Apartheid in Washington DC, June 29
DATUM: Woraus besteht Österreich?, June 29 (Tweet, Inspiration)
The Economist: Zombie research haunts academic literature long after its supposed demise, June 26
El País: Crónica visual: España reduce su posesión y los pases pero aumenta su producción ofensiva, June 23
ProPublica: Lord of the Roths: How Tech Mogul Peter Thiel Turned a Retirement Account for the Middle Class Into a $5 Billion Tax-Free Piggy Bank, June 24

Finally, this week’s COVID charts covered vaccine policy, compared variants, and looked back at changes in public opinion:

The Washington Post: Colleges want students to get a coronavirus vaccine. But they’re split on requiring the shots, June 23
The Guardian: Vaccine inequality: how rich countries cut Covid deaths as poorer fall behind, June 28
Zeit Online: Endet so die Pandemie?, June 24
The Wall Street Journal: How Mutations Have Shaped the Covid-19 Pandemic, June 27
Pew Research Center: People in Advanced Economies Say Their Society Is More Divided Than Before Pandemic, June 23

What else we found interesting

The New York Times: Is This Some Kind of Code? You Can Solve the …, June 25
xkcd (Randall Munroe): No, The Other One, June 23
Ward Shelley: The History of Science Fiction, ver. 1, 2011 (Tweeted by Manuel Lima)

And if you liked last week’s history of the England – Scotland football rivalry, now you can make your own (Tweet).


Help us make this dispatch better! We’d love to hear which newsletters, blogs, or social media accounts we need to follow to learn about interesting projects, especially from less-covered parts of the world (Asia, South America, Africa). Write us at hello@datawrapper.de or leave a comment below.

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