Inspiring people & content 📚

This page is a curated collection of articles, courses, newsletters, and individuals that I find inspiring. I hope you’ll find them interesting too!

This list is far from exhaustive, entirely subjective, and updated from time to time. Whenever I come across something or someone remarkable, I add it here. If you have any suggestions, feel free to reach out.

Inspiring people

Computational journalism 🕵️

There are so many interesting people! Here’s a Bluesky list I maintain.

Data visualization 📊

• Alberto Cairo — Author of several books on infographics and data visualization.
  Website / Bluesky / LinkedIn

• Francis Gagnon — Founder of Voilà, an information design company specializing in sustainable development.
  LinkedIn / Bluesky

• Shirley Wu — Data visualization expert.
  LinkedIn / Bluesky

• Nadieh Bremer — Data visualization expert.
  LinkedIn / Bluesky / GitHub

• Craig Taylor - Expert in spatial data visualizations.
  Website / YouTube / Bluesky

• Karim Douieb - Data scientist and data visualization expert.
  Website / LinkedIn / Bluesky

• Tanya Shapiro - Consultant in data analysis and visualization.
  Website / LinkedIn / Bluesky / GitHub

• Federica Fragapane - Independent information designer. Several of her works have been acquired by the MoMA.
  Behance / LinkedIn

• Nathan Yau - Data visualization expert and PhD in statistics. Runs Flowing Data.
  LinkedIn / Bluesky

• Sarah Fossheim - Data visualization accessibility expert.
  GitHub / LinkedIn / Bluesky

• Peter Atwood - Cartographic designer. Makes 3D maps with Blender and publishes tutorials.
  Website / LinkedIn / Bluesky

• Frank Elavsky – Expert in accessible data visualizations.
  Website / LinkedIn / Bluesky / GitHub

• Moritz Stefaner – Data visualization expert.
  Website / LinkedIn / Bluesky

• Lisa Charlotte Muth – Data visualization expert at Datawrapper.
  Website / LinkedIn / Bluesky

• Yan Holtz – Software engineer specializing in data visualization. Writes extensively about Python and R, which makes for an interesting comparison with TypeScript.
  Website / GitHub / LinkedIn / Bluesky

Code 🧑‍💻

• Mike Bostock — Creator of D3.js and founder of Observable. Formerly at The New York Times.
  GitHub / Bluesky

• Philippe Rivière — Open-source contributor with a passion for journalism and cartography. Works with Mike Bostock.
  GitHub / LinkedIn / Bluesky

• Ryan Dahl — Creator of Node.js and co-founder of Deno.
  GitHub / Bluesky

• Rich Harris — Creator of Svelte and other open-source projects. Formerly at The New York Times.
  GitHub / Bluesky

• Mathia — Creator of The Joy of Code. Explains Svelte concepts very well.
  Website / GitHub / YouTube / Bluesky

• Ricardo Cabello (Mr. Doob) — Creator of Three.js.
  GitHub / LinkedIn / Bluesky

• Matt Pocock — Author of Total TypeScript.
  GitHub / LinkedIn / YouTube / Bluesky

• Lydia Hallie — Software engineer exceptionally skilled at explaining JavaScript concepts.
  GitHub / YouTube / Bluesky

Creative coding 🦄

• Sebastian Lague — Creator of the popular Coding Adventure videos.
  GitHub / Bluesky / YouTube

• Bruno Simon — 3D web expert and author of Three.js Journey.
  GitHub / LinkedIn / Bluesky

• Daniel Shiffman — Creator of The Coding Train and The Nature of Code.
  Website / YouTube / Bluesky

Artificial intelligence 🧠

• Clément Delangue – Co-founder & CEO at Hugging Face.
  LinkedIn / Bluesky

• Simon Willison – Independent AI researcher and open-source developer. Tests new models and explains how to use them.
  Website / GitHub / Mastodon / Bluesky

• Jonathan Soma – Data journalism professor at Columbia University. Teaches many practical workshops on AI and journalism.
  Website / GitHub / LinkedIn / YouTube

• Florent Daudens – Former journalist and manager at Radio-Canada. Now press lead at Hugging Face. Talks a lot about the journalistic use of artificial intelligence.
  Website / LinkedIn / Bluesky

Data 🔢

• Max Roser - Founder of Our World in Data.
  Website/ Bluesky / LinkedIn

• Saloni Dattani – Researcher at Our World in Data. Creator of the Scientific Discovery newsletter.
  Website / LinkedIn / Bluesky

Interesting content

Newsletters ✉️

• Data Vis Dispatch — A great curation of data visualizations from media outlets, by Datawrapper.

• Flowing Data — Covers data analysis and visualization.

• Data Is Plural — A newsletter by Jeremy Singer-Vine, data editor at The New York Times, sharing interesting open datasets.

• Quantum of Sollazzo — Covers data journalism, visualization, and analysis.

• Bytes — A technical yet humorous newsletter about the JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystem.

• Buena Vista Data Club - A newsletter by the French studio We Do Data.

• Open Visualization Academy - Open Visualization Academy is an open-source repository of knowledge on information design and data visualization.

• Scientific Discovery – A newsletter featuring a wealth of interesting data visualizations.

Articles 👀

• What is Code? — A deep dive into programming, by Paul Ford for Bloomberg.

• Five ways to effectively use animation in data visualization - By the Observable HQ team.

• Math for journalists - By me. 😁

• Defense Against Dishonest Charts - By Nathan Yau, who is behind Flowing Data.

Videos 📺

• Training AI to Play Pokemon with Reinforcement Learning — An exceptional video showing AIs playing the famous video game.

• Wrapped 2023 / Wrapped 2022 / Wrapped 2021 - Compilations of work done by Craig Taylor, expert in spatial data visualization.

Courses 🧑‍🏫

Free/open-source

• R for Journalists — By Andrew Ba Tran, from The Washington Post.
• The Nature of Code — By Daniel Shiffman.

Paid

• Total TypeScript — By Matt Pocock.
• Three.js Journey — By Bruno Simon.

Data sources 🌐

• Our World In Data - A wide range of datasets covering health, poverty, and climate change. A great source for comparing countries.

Conferences 🧑‍🏫

• NICAR - The annual pilgrimage of North American data journalism.

• Outlier - A conference exclusively dedicated to data visualization.

Interesting tools

• Datashare – Created by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. An open-source tool for analyzing large volumes of unstructured documents while keeping them private.

This list will continue to grow over time. If you have any recommendations, don’t hesitate to reach out! 🚀