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Hi, I'm Gregor, welcome to my blog where I mostly write about data visualization, cartography, colors, data journalism and some of my open source software projects.

Retrospective on 15 years of data visualization projects

#datavis

For the Datawrapper Blog I took a look at metadata I collected for 15 years worth of my data visualization projects. Here’s an excerpt:

In May, I did a crazy thing and started a new job at ZEIT ONLINE! My heart is still with Datawrapper, and I’m continuing to support its future in an advisory capacity. But I had missed visualizing data and trying out new things myself, so I’m very happy with my new role.

This week, I had a few days off from my new job and took some time to update my portfolio website. It brought back good memories of the many things I’ve done over the years, so I got curious and started to collect metadata about all the projects I’ve listed on my site.

What's in my visualization portfolio?

So what can we see here? The most unsurprising fact is that I create more visualizations when I’m not busy working on Datawrapper. Another thing I sort of already knew is that 2016 was my peak year in terms of visualization output!

I seem to favor charts more than maps, and during my years at The New York Times I also grew more fond of tables. Counting these charts wasn’t easy! How do you count a page with 100 bump charts, or one with 20+ treemaps? To simplify things for this article, I just counted projects using at least one chart, map, or table.

For the next chart, I classified the visualizations into static, interactive, and animated. I used this definition: something is interactive if the user can change something about the visualization itself. A tooltip alone doesn’t change the visualization (it’s just added on top), but a search filter does (since it hides/fades elements). Animated projects are those where the visualization changes without the user doing anything active (besides perhaps hitting a “play” button).

What kind of visualizations did I create?

We can see that most of my visualizations were static, but interactive visualizations aren’t dead yet. I definitely lacked the time for interactive graphics while working on Datawrapper, though!

These definitions aren’t perfect, and I think the data would change if I had to reclassify my projects. For instance, how would you count an animated view transition in a “scrollytelling” article?

You can read the rest of the blog post here.