Alberto Cairo's weblog on visualization, infographics and data journalism

A recent Naked Data newsletter pointed me to this article on Wikipedia which gives a list of when the world was predicted to end throughout recorded history. It is a timeline of when the world...

The project is an animation that illustrates a research where scientists have been able to create a very accurate estimate of the total number of trees in the world. This animation illustrates the...

Projects in the fields of communication design, visualization and design research for national and international clients as well as self-initiated and non-commercial...

Created for a Cannes Lions panel—where Adam Bly, Spotify's VP Data, interviewed burlesque performer Dita Von Teese—this visualization shows how your music streaming habits offer a window into who...

In the twenty years since its 1998 release, Joel and Ethan Coen's neo-noir buddy comedy 'The Big Lebowski' has emerged as a cult sensation. A yearly festival is devoted to the film and its...

“Even at Shanghai’s ‘marriage market’, it’s hard to find a date” is a data analysis of personal matchmaking ads. The Paper and Sixth Tone collected hundreds of ads from the “marriage market” in...

New York State of Incarceration focuses on trends in jail population in the state of New York. While New York City jail population has dropped by more than half over the last 20 years, population...

Every Noise at Once (everynoise.com) is an algorithmically-generated, audio-annotated, dynamically evolving map of the music genre space. It arrays the 700+ major music genres tracked (so far) by...

After more than 40 years, Studs Terkel’s Working remains one of the best-known non-fiction books ever published. What’s truly remarkable is the fact that this is not a book about wars, politics or...

Royal & aristocratic families are known for their fondness of marrying within their own clique. This leads to very interesting & entangled family trees which the Royal Constellations visual...

A taxonomy of comic book characters with animals in their name.

Working with technologist Ekene Ijeoma, we created an interactive experience that illuminates where and when refugees emigrate, as well as the complex stories of political, social and economic...

This is the tenth and final Feltron Annual Report. The world of personal data has changed considerably since the project began in 2005 and this edition attempts to capture its current state. While...

This visualization shows the number of grand operas in europe, subdivided by author (the outer ring) and by city (the inner shapes). Each city is represented with a polygon in which each vertex...

This is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1387 genres by The Echo Nest. The...

One of a series of 30 weekly spreads created for the G2 newspaper

How the group of cyclists, known in the cycling world as peloton, went from a uniformly French, then European bunch, to a multicolored, multicultural, plurilingüistic mass later? The interactive...

A few weeks ago I set on trying out new WebGL 2.0 features with deck.gl. WebGL 2.0 brings plenty of new goodies to be used for game development, creative coding and data visualization like...

A look at the data behind eating insects - can it be a solution to our food security problems?

As a follow-up to last week’s visualization of Old Light and New Light, I wanted to make a single map, of the whole world, comparing NASA’s new 2016 Earth At Night image to the 2012 version. Using...

It’s more than a century since the world’s most famous literary detective made his appearance, but our appetite for his startling deductions is undiminished. Adam Frost and Jim Kynvin go back to...

In large expanses of the continental United States, spring is arriving earlier than in past years. In this graphic story for The Washington Post we analyzed first-leaf and first-bloom indexes, as...

While it may seem that the Internet is boundless, much of the world is still without an Internet Protocol (IP) address. This two-page visual illustrates, by continent, IP addresses, at the end of...

With five different data sets from three different sources we can get a sense of how Manhattan's at work and at home populations change throughout the day to create a breathing city.

The Fallen of World War II is an interactive documentary that examines the human cost of the second World War and the decline in battle deaths in the years since the war. The 15-minute data...

This is not a graphic experiment to represent Beethoven's work, but a precise research that attempts to narrate the musical and stage performance by the Quartetto Sincronie. So we decided to tell...

The map of America’s gun violence epidemic can seem overwhelming. There were more than 13,000 gun homicides in the US in 2015, across nearly 3,500 cities and towns. But the toll of this gun...

Twitter has become the venue for political outreach, international diplomacy, whitehouse personnel announcements and other important political communications. In this piece, we analyze the concept...

AtF Spark is a font that allows for the combination of text and visual data to show an idea and evidence in one headline. Sparklines are currently available as plugins or javascript elements. By...