First of all, I'm happy to announce that this newsletter has a great sponsor for the next 6 issues – the awesome folks at OpenCage. Look below for some geotastic content – Ed Freyfogle, who's the organiser of location-based service meetup Geomob, co-host of the Geomob podcast, and co-founder of the OpenCage Geocoder, has offered to introduce a set of points around the topic of geodata. His first entry on geocoding starts a few paragraphs below.

Being featured in a fascinating book at the crossroads between art and psychology? Done ;-) Jessica Helfand included my "average face of the US Congress", a piece of work I did in 2017 with BBC Future, in her book "Face – A visual anthology" (MIT Press). 
   

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What is geocoding?

Geocoding is translating between geo coordinates (latitude, longitude) and human place descriptions (addresses, placenames, etc). There are two kinds of geocoding:

• Forward geocoding: address to coordinates
• Reverse geocoding: coordinates to address

Why do we need geocoding?

More smart phones and tracking devices means more geodata is being created than ever before. Geocoding is a first step in processing that data into useful information. This series will look at the challenges around geocoding.

At OpenCage we run a highly available, simple to use, worldwide, geocoding API based on open datasets like OpenStreetMap. Want more background? Check out our comprehensive guide to reverse geocoding.

 

Environment

Who Gets to Breathe Clean Air in New Delhi?
On pollution and inequality in India, where environmental conditions are often dire.
"Air pollution killed more Indians last year than any other risk factor, and Delhi is among the most polluted cities in the country. But the burden is unequally shared."
(via Soph Warnes' Fair Warning)
 

COVID

Coronavirus tracker: the latest figures as countries fight Covid-19 resurgence 
John Burn-Murdoch and colleagues at the Financial Times are keeping this page not just up-to-date, but also free to access.
TL;DR: figures are worse than during the April peak.
 

Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
This is not quite "data", but it's terribly cool. It turns out you can take a piece of RNA, and look at it as if it were software source code.
I asked a few friends who work in bioinformatics to take a look, and they've all confirmed this is how things work (although, of course, understanding all the specific twists of the vaccine is beyond what I may be able to understand).
(via Nicola Delmonaco)

 

How fair are the new Covid-19 tiers?
"New Statesman analysis reveals a disparity between the government's new tiers and the severity of coronavirus in several areas."

How to visualize hyperlocal COVID data
Journalist Francesco Piccinelli Casagrande shows, in brief, why he thinks that a LOESS regression on a log chart works best to show hyperlocal data in Italy. 
"Italy’s multilevel governance system is complex. We have national, regional, provincial, and communal levels. The most granular COVID data available in Italy are at the provincial level. After some reflection on how to better visualize COVID in Italian provinces, I came up with a solution. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the: log-new daily cases with loess smoother."
 

Datawrapper: A chart’s worth of hope
Datawrapper's CEO shows how to replicate the COVID-19 incidence chart in the vaccine trial.
 

Covid: Cancer scan backlog raises late detection fears
A look at what COVID has done to routine clinical services, by the BBC Shared Data Unit, which also released the data they've collected.
 

Politics

Financial Sinkholes
The amount of money spent in US political campaigns will never cease to make me feel dizzy,
"Democrats spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Senate races that they ended up losing. Whether they can regain control of the Senate now hangs on a pair of runoffs in Georgia."
(via Soph Warnes' Fair Warning) 

WOW factor

Codex Atlanticus
Oh, wow. A visualization and interactive exploration of the largest collection of Leonardo da Vinci's writing and drawings.
 

Tools, tutorials, and data theory

Smoothly animate thousands of points with HTML5 canvas and D3
It's a bit old, but it looks still useful to me. (If you need considerably more than 5,000 points, you should look at this other tutorial by the same author, using WebGL instead of canvas).
 

Observable & creative coding
Lionel Radisson, a designer, maker, and teacher, has been playing with creative code for 10 years. He says: "Throughout these years, I've used many different tools including openprocessing, codepen, glitch, p5js editor, github pages, canvas-sketch, jsbin, codepan, codesandbox, replit,… when I heard about Observable, I thought why not try a new one. Nearly a year has passed since I started, and I'd like to share this journey."

In Defence of Data-Dense Visualizations
Sometimes less is more; sometimes it isn't: "not all problems are simple".
An interesting take on data-density.
 

Datasheets for Datasets
*ACADEMIC PAPER KLAXON*
"The machine learning community currently has no standardized process for documenting datasets, which can lead to severe consequences in high-stakes domains. To address this gap, we propose datasheets for datasets. In the electronics industry, every component, no matter how simple or complex, is accompanied with a datasheet that describes its operating characteristics, test results, recommended uses, and other information. By analogy, we propose that every dataset be accompanied with a datasheet that documents its motivation, composition, collection process, recommended uses, and so on. Datasheets for datasets will facilitate better communication between dataset creators and dataset consumers, and encourage the machine learning community to prioritize transparency and accountability."

Spanish Maps

La Espana segregata – Segregated Spain
Originally in Spanish and here translated automatically in English, this article looks at census and other statistical data to make an assessment of where foreign communities live in major Spanish cities and beyond, suggesting they tend to live separated from each other.
"The Moroccans in the peripheries, the British on the coast and the Chinese in the big cities show a country of inequalities, where are the foreign communities concentrated?"
 

Carta Històrica de Barcelona
What the name says: a historical map of Barcelona, with a timeline interactive slider. Developed by Barcelona's history museum.