Jonas Oesch

How to properly AI-generate alt-texts for charts A simple screenshot prompt produces texts that are too long and unstructured. By interviewing blind readers, Alessia Vannini and Julia Locher found a form that works much better. Report and examples: github.com/a-vannini/Al...

A rough 3D reconstruction of «Le Constellation» in Crans-Montana. Using publicly available photos, videos and plans @simonhuwiler.ch, Forrest Rogers and I reconstructed the bar’s layout and approximate dimensions. www.nzz.ch/visuals/aktu...

Brilliant choice of bivariate color palette in this map of water stress from @wriclimate.bsky.social & ESRI. I love how it draws attention to areas with high demand for water with saturated colors, & distinguishes low & high availability with a striking change in hue. via @dantoearth.bsky.social

How the Swiss National Council has shifted over time: Analyzing every vote since 2004 shows that party differences have become more distinct, with fewer overlaps than in earlier years. www.nzz.ch/visuals/parl...

Why Visual Journalism is so slow? I've tracked every hour I worked on an article for two weeks last year. Most of my time did not go into graphics production but in researching and analyzing data. The detailed breakdown and some ideas how to speed up the process: nightingaledvs.com/why-visual-j...

The balance of power in the Middle East has been shifting for some time. Iran’s allies are eroding, but its former rival Saudi Arabia is warming relations. Explore our updated interactive map: www.nzz.ch/english/inte...

2 Millionen Kubikmeter Gestein sind bereits bei Blatten abgebrochen, weitere 2 bis 4 Millionen Kubikmeter instabiles Material befinden sich noch am Berg. Wie gehts weiter? Die Szenarien von @jonasoesch.ch, @rolandshaw.bsky.social und Jan Ludwig. www.nzz.ch/visuals/die-... @nzz.ch

🗺️ If you’re a map enthusiast, be sure to read this week’s Data Vis Dispatch! You’ll also find charts on government spending, measles, and the Arctic. 🐻‍❄️🧊 www.datawrapper.de/blog/data-vi...

Computational Public Space. A talk about a values-driven approach to integrating computation into cities. (40 min) www.youtube.com/watch?v=PixP...

Very nice! A few years back we faced the same problem and tried different solutions. From using a different projection to cutting the map and even rotating it. espace-mondial-atlas.sciencespo.fr/en/topic-res...

A trick for fitting world maps on phones: Stack two azimuthal equal-area projections, clipped at 90° longitude, each one rotated 180° from the other. The bottom map covers the top's Antarctica, which reduces the total height and looks nice. As seen in www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/c...

What if the U.S. adjusted its tariffs on Germany and Switzerland to match what those countries charge? This NZZ chart by @florianseliger.bsky.social & @jonasoesch.ch shows how U.S. tariffs would rise under 3 "reciprocity" scenarios using my data from the Global Tariff Database 👇

Now that we have vibe coding, we need vibe testing!

In recent months, Internet cables in the Baltic Sea have been damaged multiple times — Russian sabotage is suspected. But how does that work? Together with @cianjochem.bsky.social & @lukasmaeder.bsky.social , we visualized one case (inspired by Reuters 🤩) www.nzz.ch/ld.1875983

two weeks ago I published www.shirleywu.studio/notebook/202... re: plateau in innovation I've felt in #dataviz last few years. I've been furiously working on the follow-up (so many thoughts!) & it'll finally be out next Monday 🎉 if you'd like an email notification: www.shirleywu.studio/notebook

🏠 Nice & clean → relatively low rent? 🏡 Gorgeous & beautiful → really expensive? Which adjectives in Craigslist rental posts for SF Bay Area go with which prices? #TidyTuesday | 2022 week 27

Do you want to animate a @vega-vis.bsky.social vega-lite or @observablehq.com Plot chart? Here is a quick experiment that might help you that animates between two SVGs. Let me know what you think! #dataviz. 👉🏼 observablehq.com/@john-guerra...

Swiss supermarket chain Migros promised price cuts—and delivered on many. But at the same time, products like chocolate and coffee became more expensive, reflecting global market trends. For most shoppers, the result is only modest savings. www.nzz.ch/ld.1869677

What are people searching on Google when it comes to German election candidates? We visualized it! 📊 ➡️ first 10 free: www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web...

Hello dataviz and design people! We're looking for a freelancer to help us with data visualization and/or diagrams at Works in Progress. We cover topics like housing, technology, health, energy, and much more, and experience in these areas is a plus! If this is you, get in touch! (details below)

Some new stuff in Fun-tography mhinfographics.github.io/maps 🗺️✈️ a place for #map nerdies

Marius Irgens on distortions in vis: "A more common way to distort in […] visualization is through non-linear color mapping." True. Designing a truthful color mapping is incredibly difficult – if not impossible. But as he notes, you need to be transparent about it. nightingaledvs.com/distortion-b...

NEW: 2024 has just been confirmed as the warmest year on record, and the first to breach the 1.5C threshold. We used a ridgeline (Joy Division inspired) chart to visualise daily temperature anomalies since 1940. 2024 clearly stands out with 100% of its days above 1.3C and 75% above 1.5C.

Highlighting some exponential progress in the race to #netzero (by @billmckibben)

Los Angeles brennt. Angefacht durch die Santa-Ana-Winde. Mit bis zu 113 Kilometer pro Stunde fegen sie über die Stadt. Verursacht haben sie die Brände aber nicht. Eine Analyse von @sventitz.bsky.social, @jonasoesch.ch, Roland Shaw, Jasmine Rüegg, @jeberhart.bsky.social 👉 www.nzz.ch/wissenschaft...

Very important thread. Discontinuing fact checking *is* biased because it vastly favours one side of politics. (The side that is spreading disinformation more often, and if you don't know which side that is, you can find out by looking at the data below. Or any other data, there is a plenty).

Visualizing uncertainty in stacked bar charts is a constant problem I face in my work. I absolutely *love* these fuzzy plots, so I made a gist to try them out using simulated data. #rstats gist.github.com/Koalha/d9403...

Come work with me at Planet! Our exceptional data viz team is looking to hire a senior data visualization engineer based in San Francisco: job-boards.greenhouse.io/planetlabs/j...

Bivariate maps showing the relationships between Temperature and Precipitation. Made with Plot, based on a great tutorial by Fil: observablehq.com/@jo... Data from TerraClimate (1958-present). #cartography #maps #mapping #climate #dataviz #SciArt

project 1: Map Designer, a #dataviz tool and @figma.com plug in that simplifies the process creating and customizing maps in Figma! Had a lot of fun learning how to translate d3-geo's svg paths into Figma's vector networks. try it out and let me know what you think! www.figma.com/community/pl...

Sharing this to the world in case someone wants to try this on its own: mhinfographics.com/2024/12/19/t...

Stuff like this is genuinely fun as a silly game, but a reminder from your friendly neighborhood color vision scientist that it absolutely CANNOT be used to compare performance between people using different/uncalibrated displays or even the same display in different viewing environments.

How can we visualize what a book ISN'T talking about? With an anti-tag cloud! See the most common English words that are never mentioned in a text. www.bewitched.com/demo/anti/

The "slop" problem for A.I.: When generative A.I. is trained on a lot of its own output, it can get a lot worse. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

♾️ Infinity: an interactive explorer A labour of love for half a year, going back to my roots in maths and rediscovering some of its beauty in the process. 💙💜💚 ⛏️ React, three.js, R3F, GSAP, d3.js #threejs #react #r3f #gsap #dataviz #creativecoding 🔗 maths-infinity.netlify.app

the algorithm is not some deity but a landscape, the feed is an uber ride across the manifold, only the windows are blacked out. what if you had a map of the algorithm? what if the UX of the feed let you look out of the window? musing with @infowetrust.com image from distill.pub/2017/aia/

🐟 some musings on how we might use LLMs 🐠 to interact with text at multiple levels of abstraction 🐡 inspired by the fish-eye lens

We've created an interactive map of actors in the Middle East. Click on any actor to uncover their allies, enemies, or frenemies 👉 www.nzz.ch/ld.1859853

New blog post! Updated for 2024, my favorite example of why alphabetical ordering is bad for geographic features -- US presidential results since 1828. The left image shows regional patterns in a geographic ordering that the right (alphabetical) simply loses. benschmidt.org/post/2024-11...

Sie haben nächste Woche einen wichtigen Auswärtstermin? Unser neues @zeit.de Tool sagt Ihnen, welchen Zug Sie nehmen sollten, um pünktlich anzukommen. Dafür hat @selinarudolph.bsky.social die Verspätungen von knapp 150.000 Bahnverbindungen ausgewertet. www.zeit.de/mobilitaet/2...

Something is happening with engagement on Bluesky. I ran a little analysis looking at a few recent news stories from NYT, WSJ and CNN across X, Threads and Bluesky and it looks like engagement on Bluesky is much higher when you account for the size of the platforms. sherwood.news/tech/bluesky...

Wo gibt es noch günstigen Wohnraum in Zürich? Wir haben über Monate Immoportale ausgelesen und diese interaktive Stadt gebaut. www.nzz.ch/visuals/koen... @jonasoesch.bsky.social @nzz.ch

Satellite images show: Israel is building roads and military bases in the Gaza Strip - do these indicate a permanent occupation? A visual analysis by @jeberhart.bsky.social -not only on the front of our newspaper but also told in a highly visual and interactive format: www.nzz.ch/internationa... 👈 🛰️