Interesting Data Maps From Around the Web — DataViz Weekly
We have come across several interesting data maps over the past few days, so this edition of DataViz Weekly leans spatial. The four projects we selected show how maps can make location, scale, and geographic patterns easier to explore. Today’s selection:
- 146 million U.S. jobs by sector — Kyle Walker
- Sahel violence and Nigeria as its hotspot — The Guardian
- Rio de Janeiro’s sister cities — Georgios Karamanis
- Tobacco smoking endgame — Amanda Shendruk
146M U.S. Jobs by Sector
Roughly 146 million people work in the United States across a wide range of industries. Where those jobs sit on the map varies sharply by sector.
Kyle Walker mapped the United States by workplace location using the U.S. Census Bureau’s LODES dataset. The result is a zoomable dot map on a dark base, with each dot encoding jobs in one of 20 sectors. Sector colors group naturally. Oranges and reds cover primary industries and manufacturing. Teals handle trade and transportation. Blues mark finance and professional services. Greens cover education and healthcare, while purples are reserved for arts and hospitality.
The jobs-per-dot count scales continuously with zoom and updates live in the lower-left corner. At the national scale, each dot can stand for thousands of jobs. As you zoom in, that count falls, eventually reaching one job per dot at the closest levels. Broad urban clusters then resolve into the finer fabric of business districts, industrial parks, and retail corridors.
👉 Explore the map on Kyle Walker’s website.
Sahel Violence and Nigeria
Terrorism-related deaths in the Sahel have climbed sharply over the past two decades. Nigeria, the region’s most populous country, has become a particularly violent hotspot.
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The Guardian drew on data from Acled and the Global Terrorism Index 2026 for a multi-part piece. A stacked area chart opens the story by showing the Sahel’s share of global terrorism deaths. It rises from under 1% in 2007 to roughly half over the past three years. Hexagonal binned maps then animate year by year from 2020 to 2025. They show political violence incidents across the region climbing from about 5,800 to over 15,000 before easing last year.
The centerpiece is a bubble map of violence involving non-state actors. Each bubble is placed at an incident site, sized by fatalities, and colored by the armed group involved. The view begins at the regional scale, picking out clusters in Sudan and the triangle where Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger meet. It then zooms into Nigeria to walk through bandit violence in the northwest, herder and farmer clashes across western states, attacks around Kainji, and the long-running Boko Haram and ISWAP insurgency in the northeast.
👉 See the article on The Guardian, by Eromo Egbejule, Antonio Voce, Ashley Kirk, Alex Olorenshaw, and Stefania Orlando.
Rio de Janeiro Sister Cities
Sister city agreements are formal partnerships between two cities. They are intended to support exchange and cooperation across borders. Rio de Janeiro has signed more of them than any other city in the world.
Georgios Karamanis turned Rio de Janeiro’s 93 sister city agreements, using data from Wikidata compiled by Ahmad Barclay for the Twin Cities Explorer project into a scroll-driven connector map. The first view places every twinned city in the world as a faint dot on a dark world background. The view then narrows to Rio, where each partner city appears as a yellow dot connected by a curved great-circle line.
As you scroll, the narrative steps through the network continent by continent. Niterói sits just across Guanabara Bay. Asunción and Buenos Aires anchor the southern lines. Europe holds 26 partners, including 14 in Portugal. Africa adds 15 connections, from Praia and Luanda to Lagos and Maputo. North America contributes 12, from Havana to Atlanta. The Asian arc stretches east through Beijing, Seoul, and Busan to Kobe, 18,717 kilometers from Rio. A summary at the end tallies 93 partner cities across five continents and 776,848 kilometers of lines in total.
👉 Check out the story here.
Tobacco Smoking Endgame
The U.K. has passed a generational smoking ban. From 2027, tobacco cannot be sold to anyone born in 2009 or later, with the legal purchase age rising one year per year. It is the second country to enact such a law, after the Maldives passed its own six months earlier.
Amanda Shendruk’s piece on Not-Ship covers the case behind the U.K. ban and where the rest of the world stands on ending smoking. A global choropleth map shows tobacco endgame readiness at a glance, drawn from a 2024 Lancet Global Health study. Countries fall into four categories. Dark blue marks endgame ready, light blue almost ready, light orange more action needed, and orange early epidemic stage. The 28 endgame-ready countries cluster across Africa, Latin America, and South Asia rather than the wealthier West.
Supporting visuals include a bar chart ranking smoking as the third highest global risk factor for death. A one-dimensional dot plot shows percentage change in smoking rates by country between 2005 and 2025.
👉 Look at the piece on Not-Ship.
Data maps run through this week’s selection in different forms, from dots and bubbles to connectors and choropleth maps. Each approach to visualize location-related data helps frame a different kind of question. We will be back next Friday with more good data visualization work from around the web:
