════╡ ✱ This Week's Links ✱ ╞════

Everything about this thread is wonderful. Rasagy Sharma and Arun Ganesh run a digital cartography module at National Institute of Design, Bangalore and this repository contains all their course materials and resources. What is even better is that student discussions and assignments are also public! You can see progress being made and iterations happen. The other ‘Issues’ on the repo are also worth strolling through.

As someone who restricts themselves to ‘available’ shapefiles for work and doesn’t really map from scratch, this is really educational for me too.

By far the coolest classroom I can imagine.

The Milestones Project is a comprehensive, visual compendium of significant events in the histories of data visualization, statistical graphics and thematic cartography. This new version features an interactive timeline, an interactive map of authors’ birthplaces, and a calendar of significant events in this history.

Amazing timeline tool. When did the first line chart or network diagram appear? How did we get from Edmund Halley’s contour map in 1701 to ggplot2?

Michael Friendly, the author of this project, also posts regularly on Bluesky in form of ‘Today in History’ posts, like this one.

I spend a lot of time at the IKEA in Bangalore since the restaurant is great to work from, but I rarely, if ever, actually wander through the store. The store’s lack of windows and the general sameness of the environment has confused me many times and until very late, I was not aware of the shortcuts I could take to get out faster.

Experienced IKEA shoppers may have noticed ‎that the shortcuts change over time. This is to prevent too many consumers from learning about and using them. And as part of the general retail principle of changing up the layout to keep repeat shoppers stimulated\ …\ The new IKEA line map dispenses with reality altogether – it is a purely abstract one dimensional representation of an intensely non-linear, two dimensional space. As a result, trans‎posing the map to the physical reality of the store now requires significant mental effort. Hence most shoppers give up and stick to the flow of the shopping path.

The author makes some valid points, but perhaps I wasn’t the audience this was written for because whenever I do roam the store, I love to do it. But it still has some great observations about wayfinding and the use of maps within the stores (I also didn’t know that the general layout is almost the same for every IKEA).

Being able to recognize which parts of a data visualization produce barriers for people with disabilities can be tough. But Chartability has compiled existing standards, research, and community best practices into a comprehensive set of things to look out for. Ideally, it can help folks who create visualizations really think deeply about accessibility when they design.

I’d like to get better at accessibility this year, for my websites and especially visualizations. I don’t think I can ever definitely arrive at a point where I can claim to do it perfectly but getting exposure to such ideas and incorporating them slowly is a start. Chartability is a set of heuristics to help do an audit for your visualizations, and comes with a ton of resources including a full example audit to help you understand how you can use it too.