✚ Visual Metaphor

Welcome to The Process, the newsletter for FlowingData members that looks closer at how the charts get made. I’m Nathan Yau. Statistical charts are often abstract representations of data whittled down to bare geometries. It’s hard to interpret anything beyond quantitative measurements when all you’ve got is a barebones bar chart. Visual metaphors can help with that.

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World map of illustrated animals

During a three-year span, Anton Thomas illustrated a world map of 1,642 animals native to each region. It’s called Wild World. The New York Times highlighted the work:

“We don’t see the latitude and longitude lines of maps,” he said. “We see the world, in our heads, through icons.”

For Mr. Thomas, this equates to a kind of “emotional geography,” where features with greater emotional heft — the New York City skyline, say, or the Golden Gate Bridge — may take up more space.

“There are animals the sizes of mountain ranges on my map,” he said. “But you know what? The African lion should tower over Kilimanjaro, if we’re drawing an emotional map.”

Prints for Wild World, among other illustrated maps, are available in Thomas’ shop.

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Toddlers and stochastic parrots

For The New Yorker, Angie Wang draws parallels between toddler learning behavior and training large language models, but more importantly, where they diverge.

They are the least useful, the least creative, and the least likely to pass a bar exam. They fall far below the median human standard
that machines are meant to achieve.

They are so much less than a machine, and yet it’s clear to any of us that they’re so much more than a machine.

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Turn a static SVG into an interactive one, with Flourish

It’s straightforward to share a static SVG online, but maybe you want tooltips or for elements to highlight when you hover over them. Flourish has a new template to provide the interactions easier. Seems promising.

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Outsourced work and generative AI

For Rest of World, Andrew Deck turned the AI focus on outsourced workers, whose jobs have been directly affected as of late and will probably shift much more. Deck profiled and commissioned four workers to make things without AI and with:

For more than seven years, Santiago Bautista González worked full time selling his cartoon-style illustrations, using the freelance gig marketplace Fiverr. His income, around $1,500 in a good month, dropped by a third this past January. February was equally disappointing.

In search of an explanation, Bautista, 31, read about the growing popularity of visual generative AI software. He found that Fiverr had added a section for AI artists. “And I say, ‘Well, maybe it’s because of this,'” he told Rest of World.

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Mona Chalabi wins Pulitzer for data illustrations

Mona Chalabi, known around these parts for her illustrative approach to data journalism, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her New York Times piece on Jeff Bezos’ extreme wealth. She compared the scale of Jeff Bezos wealth against median wealth, and the absurdity of the scale leant itself to ridiculous comparisons.

Amazing. Congratulations to Mona.

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Spy balloons and UFOs

For The New York Times, Eleanor Lutz illustrated things in the sky, because there are other objects up there other than spy balloons and UFOs. A long vertical scale is used to represent altitude. Bonus points for moving the objects around to give a floating effect.

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✚ Real Bits

Welcome to issue #226 of The Process, where we look closer at how the charts get made. I’m Nathan Yau, and I’m thinking about the real bits behind the charts that help you understand the data better and care a little more.

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Search and rescue after an earthquake, illustrated

After a big earthquake, such as the 7.8 that hit Turkey and Syria, it is important that search and rescue be carried through in an organized way when everything around is chaos. For Reuters, Adolfo Arranz, Simon Scarr, and Jitesh Chowdhury illustrate the guidelines recommended by the International Search and Rescue Advisory Group.

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Inferring the scale of China’s Covid spike through obituaries

China reported 80,000 Covid deaths since lifting restrictions in early December 2022. But researchers believe the count is much higher, because the figure only includes hospital deaths and the country does not require Covid testing as strictly as before. So, for The New York Times, Pablo Robles, Vivian Wang, and Joy Dong evaluated the change in scale of scholars’ obituaries, which appears to correlate with China’s restriction timeline.

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