A few months ago, I wrapped up a freelance project that made heavy use of the USDA Quick Stats data. It’s a super neat compilation of agricultural data that was begging to be made into nicer maps than the source site provides. I was immediately interested in finding out where specific crops were grown across…
Only 6 streets in Portland are named after people of color. Given Oregon’s history, this is isn’t exactly unexpected, but I still find myself surprised at just how low the number is. Three are civil rights heroes with streets named for them across the country: Martin Luther King, Jr, Rosa Parks, and Cesar Chavez. Three…
I made a map! And it went viral! Neat! I got a number of requests for the code, so I thought this would be the best forum to share how I made it. To be honest, I whipped this out to quickly to illustrate a concept in Slack, then tweeted it because I liked it….
It’s not a really secret, but I try not to advertise this. I watch ASMR. A lot. Sometimes in the evening, to wind down. Other times at night when I can’t sleep. But most often during the workdday, to provide quiet background noise while I work. I favor pretty vanilla ASMR–quiet tapping, people doing tasks…
And just like that, another year is gone. As in 2020, I spent 2021 carefully logging my reading on my Kindle to visualize at year-end. If you’d like to know how I did this or to view my data from 2020, check out this post. How much did I read? Depending on what metric you…
It’s been a minute since I last posted some personal work. This feels great! Hello! One thing I really didn’t expect about doing dataviz professionally is that it’s really put a damper on my motivation to work on personal viz projects. And, naturally, I also adopted a puppy. He chewed through my computer charger and…
My last post, Average Colors of the World, leaked out of this blog and spread all over the internet! It was super neat, but a common piece of feedback stuck in my head: I only mapped what the world looked like in summer. The colors would be vastly different in any other season. I really…
I wrote that I wanted to expand creatively beyond maps in 2021, but here we are, halfway in, and half my posts are maps. In my defense, I made these last year and just haven’t gotten around to posting them yet! They’ve been sitting in a folder since December, mocking me. It’s time to get…
Every so often, a woman poses with a piece of her art, uploads it to Reddit, and the site loses its mind. Seemingly half the commenters claim her art is only getting popular because she posed with it, and the other half of commenters are defending her right to do so. Just a few examples…
Well, here I am, after three months, finally posting again. It’s been a while, but for good reason: 🎉 🥂 I finally have a job in data visualization! 🥂 🎉 It’s very like me to run a data viz blog for years, get paid actual dollars for freelance work, and still doubt whether or not…