| | A fall botanical edition of Data&Eggs |
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What can a tree tell you about a neighborhood's income? What can a hand-drawn root from 1919 teach you about proportion? Quite a lot, it turns out.
Before we get to that, a quick request: Fill out this survey to help us plan our upcoming year. We want to make sure our tools and content are relevant and useful.
It's fall, the season when plants command our attention, so this month we're looking at botanicals and what they can teach us about data visualization. As stories of a changing climate grow in urgency and importance, we need more botanical representation, literally, on Earth and in our databases.
Here are five pieces that are labors of love and deep points of inspiration for us as a team: |
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Mona Chalabi: The Gray-Green Divide
All of us at The DataFace are big fans of Mona Chalabi's work. Her pieces share common themes: they are political, human-centered, focused on raising awareness, and they blend publicly available data with her illustrations. The project we chose to highlight is a huge installation at the Brooklyn Museum that uses botanical, nature-themed data and visuals to ask a question: who has access to green and gray spaces in New York City? As you may expect, people who have access to green also tend to be wealthy. She uses her hand-drawn illustrations and lots of data visualization to make the point. Check out this 90-minute video. It's totally worth it. |
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Attila Bátorfy: John Ernst Weaver’s fantastic drawings of root systems
John Ernst Weaver, an American botanist who studied Nebraska's prairies, drew root systems by hand across decades of research, starting with The Ecological Relations of Roots in 1919. Shout out to Attila Bátorfy, whose indie blog, Cabinet of Infographic Curiosities, painstakingly gathered these drawings from library archives to showcase them. It's one of our designers' favorite examples of proportion: modern data visualization designers might choose a more abstract representation of tree to root system, but these illustrations remind her there's a place for detail. If you go outside and you don't live in a gray area, remember this anytime you see a tree. There are deep, deep roots of all shapes and sizes growing right beneath you. |
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| \n\n | NPR: The USDA's Gardening Zones
We love this NPR piece because it blends personalization, scrollytelling, cartography and a cute set of illustrated plants to introduce the concept of hardiness, which is basically how cold temperatures decide what plants can survive in your garden. Plug in your zip code and an interactive, personalized database gives you insights specific to your region. The piece shows how much can be achieved with tried and true data visualization and storytelling techniques. When it all comes together, it creates something superlative. |
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New York Botanical Garden: The Welikia Project
What was New York before it became the New York City we know today? The Welikia Project maps the city's landscape, block by block, as it looked about 400 years ago, so you can explore the forests, streams and wetlands that stood where the streets are now. The flow feels natural and gives you a ton of avenues to explore, with maps that layer today's satellite images over a view from centuries ago and paths to explore the flora and fauna of any NYC block. Before Grand Central was a train terminal, it was part of an oak-tulip tree forest, home to plants like panicgrass, white wood aster and blackhaw. If you're a New Yorker, you can spend hours looking at this. |
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Herbal Archive: A living index of botanical image-making
The Herbal Archive is an independent project made by two designers who started photographing and cataloging the plants they could find, drawn to \"the small details you only notice when you look closely.\" Their catalogue spans different forms of botanical imagery, like cyanotypes, scans and pressed specimens. The archive is what we call an index, which focuses on the details of individual entries, slightly different from a database which optimizes for highlighting patterns across entries. In this case, each entry invites you to ask: What makes this image special? Why are these particular plants featured, and what does that say about the artists? You can explore more indexes in the Data&Eggs library. |
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| Know other standout data storytelling projects? Submit a project to Data&Eggs. |
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| | \n\n | | Explore more standout data storytelling. |
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| If you care about visual decisions that shape understanding, charts that communicate a message and about pushing this craft forward, you’re in the right place. Browse our collection of 200+ projects and counting. |
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| | | | | | What’s Up at
The DataFace |
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We built a new website for Grant Witness and launched Lost Funds with States United, two projects that deal with the Trump administration's disruption of federal grant funds.
Tracking how much funding the administration has disrupted is a surprisingly difficult thing to calculate. The data is buried in USAspending records, agency communications, and court filings, and wasn’t neatly organized in a central repository. Now it is, along with the on-the-ground impacts across all 50 states. Both projects have brought national and local coverage to these impacts, earning coverage in the Associated Press, NPR and local news organizations.
Meanwhile, our Storytelling Studio has gained momentum. Clients' executives are using what we've created in their own social media posts, and some of it has even landed on the New York Stock Exchange, where Faire's CFO Jason Lee talked through our independent retail analysis.
Work from the Studio has been featured in Forbes, USA Today, Women's Wear Daily, Retail Insider and many more. If your company is sitting on data that deserves a bigger audience, we'd love to talk.
That's it for now! See you next month.
Data&Eggs is a monthly newsletter from The DataFace. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.
—The Data&Eggs Team
eggs.thedataface.com
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| | | | | | | | | Created with ❤️ by data
enthusiasts at The DataFace. |
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