A Data Visualization Newsletter

Harvard’s Engineering Department touts itself as one of the most collaborative, interdisciplinary schools in the country. But how do you visually communicate that idea? We helped Harvard design and build the Faculty Explorer, a data platform with four interactive visualizations that examine the connections and overlapping research interests among Harvard professors.

Today’s oceans are a bit like the Old West — rich with resources and too vast to effectively police. So how can government officials track and catch illegal fishing operations? Recently a team of data scientists at the Global Fishing Watch had a novel idea: instead of looking at transponder data to figure out where boats were positioned, they instead started looking at where boats hid their locations.

The pandemic sparked a massive reshuffling of the American workforce, as people adjusted to work from home and many shifted careers. New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows which industries boomed — transportation, healthcare, computer work — and which contracted. The data also shows how lower wage workers generally received larger raises than those at the top, shrinking the pay gap across occupations.

A Bloomberg analysis of 5,000 images created with Stable Diffusion — a text-to-image AI generator — shows an alarming amount of bias in its output. The images took racial and gender disparities to their extremes, rarely showing women as lawyers or doctors, and frequently depicting people of color as criminals. As these AI systems start to be more widely adopted, it’s worth considering how they may perpetuate stereotypes.

All 51 City Council seats in New York City are officially up for grabs next Tuesday, as primary elections get underway. This resource from The City and Spectrum News compiles information about the candidates, demographics, and politics of each district and shows past election trends. Even for those who don’t live in NYC, it’s a masterclass in great data viz.

During the first year of the pandemic, San Francisco had an almost unprecedented exodus of residents. The city’s population fell to its lowest level since 2010, erasing a decade of population gains in a single year. But SF isn’t the only one; as new data from the Census Bureau shows, other counties along the California coast and in the Pacific Northwest suffered a similar fate.