Good visuals help people explore and explain data. Each round of DataViz Weekly brings together a handful of projects that do this especially well.

Check out what we found this time:

• The most connected actors in Hollywood — The Pudding
• Abandoned farmland and wildfires in Spain — Reuters
• India’s arms exports to Europe — Bloomberg
• U.S. House race ratings on an equal-area map — Karim Douïeb

Most Connected Actors in Hollywood

Three college students invented Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in 1994. The goal is to link him to any other actor through a chain of co-stars, using as few films as possible. That same year, Bacon said in an interview that he had worked with everybody in Hollywood or someone who had.

Owen Lacey checked that claim against a network of about 169,000 performers from the 10,000 English-language movies with the most votes on IMDb. Each person gets a remoteness score, the average number of films it takes to reach the rest of the cast. After a short intro built on a network graph, the field of dots pictured above shows how this works for one person at a time. Everyone else sorts into bands by distance, and a search box lets you look up anyone. A ranking follows, with a strip of the same bands for each name.

From there, the story travels back in time and then forward. A line chart follows the most central actors through the decades, with a slider reaching back to 1980. Scatter plots then explore what drives remoteness. For the future, an animated chart tallies 10,000 simulations to see which Gen Z star could become the next center.

👉 Take a look at the story on The Pudding.

Abandoned Farmland and Wildfires in Spain

This year’s wildfire season in Europe was among the worst on record. The largest blaze in Spain broke out west of Madrid in July and burned 63,000 hectares. Since the 1950s, millions of people have left the Spanish countryside for cities.

Reuters looked at how the landscape in that fire’s path has changed over the same decades. The Sankey diagram shown above covers the area inside the fire perimeter. Five types of land cover from 1990 sit at the top, and streams carry each one down to what it had become by 2018. A 3D-rendered strip of countryside above the columns pictures every type.

The article opens on a similar rendered valley, which changes with the decades as you scroll until flames sweep through it. Later come maps of the burned area and property ownership, then-and-now aerial imagery, and a line chart of national land use since 1860.

👉 See the piece on Reuters, by Kate Abnett, Pietro Lombardi, and Mariano Zafra.

India’s Arms Exports to Europe

As fighting in Ukraine escalated, demand for artillery shells and other munitions soared. Western arms makers have struggled to keep up. India, long one of the world’s biggest weapons importers, has been expanding its own defense industry and its exports.

Bloomberg traced the country’s arms sales to Europe through trade and customs records. The main view, shown above, is a ribbon chart, a stacked area chart whose layers re-sort by size every year. Each band stands for a supplier, sized by the value of its deliveries to 13 Eastern European countries. When rankings change, the bands cross. India’s is green, and the rest are gray. A large panel covers artillery shells, mortars, and similar munitions, with two smaller ones for propellants and explosives.

Further down, the same format covers aircraft and drone parts sold to Israel. A pictograph of product photos, one per 1,000 units, sorts shipments by category, and a flow map breaks them down by destination.

👉 Check out the article on Bloomberg, by Dan Strumpf, Vignesh Radhakrishnan, and Sudhi Ranjan Sen, with graphics by Adrian Leung and Raeedah Wahid.

U.S. House Race Ratings on Equal-Area Map

An average U.S. House district is home to about 760,000 people. In land area, the differences are vast. Some span a few city neighborhoods, while Alaska’s covers the entire state.

Karim Douïeb mapped the 2026 House races, coloring each district by its Cook Political Report rating. Seven shades run from solid Democratic in dark blue through gray toss-ups to solid Republican in dark red. The opening view is an equal-area cartogram. Each state is resized by its number of seats and split into that many equal cells. A toggle switches to a regular geographic choropleth map, and a slider morphs one into the other.

Hovering over a cell brings up its partisan lean and rating. A tally at the top counts how many races favor each party, plus the toss-ups. A strip below lines up all 435 from the safest Democratic seat to the safest Republican one, with the 218th marked.

👉 Explore the cartogram at midterms.klet.app.

Data visuals like these are what DataViz Weekly is about. In this AnyChart blog series, we look through data visualization published online and feature projects that make the data easier to understand. Each project gets a brief overview and a direct link, so you can open it and form your own view. The next round is coming soon:

👉 DataViz Weekly on AnyChart Blog
👉 DataViz Weekly on Medium

Originally published at https://www.anychart.com on October 30, 2026.

Fresh Visuals Putting Data to Work — DataViz Weekly was originally published in Data Visualization Weekly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We spend a lot of time looking at data visualization from all corners of the web. Projects that stay with us well after the first look end up in DataViz Weekly, where we share them as examples.

Four made the cut for this edition, and we invite you to explore them:

• Cyber risk by U.S. industry — Moody’s
• Senate and House races in the 2026 midterms — The Guardian
• The Michigan Senate debate in left- and right-leaning posts — The New York Times
• Licensed dogs across New York City neighborhoods — Firat Ciftci

Cyber Risk by U.S. Industry

AI models are becoming skilled at finding security holes in software. The same tools can help companies patch their systems, or attackers break into them.

Moody’s compared 21 U.S. sectors by how exposed they are to cyberattacks and how well they guard against them. The visuals open in program windows on an old-style computer screen, with a game-like icon for each sector. The icons first line up by exposure, then by defenses. Combined, the two rankings form a quadrant chart, split by median lines. The most vulnerable industries land in the top right corner.

Four rounds of quiz questions follow. You pick answers in the quadrant itself or skip straight to the highlighted ones. Along the way, smaller heat maps, column charts, and Venn diagrams fill in the details, from component scores to modeled losses by company size. At the end, a full heat map lays out all 21 industries against ten factors. A toggle switches it from 2026 levels to changes since 2024, and clicking a column sorts the rows.

👉 Check out the data story on Moody’s, with research and analysis by David Gatey, Lesley Ritter, Chris Vos, Hesam Talebiyan, and Emine Bassoum, and visuals by Eric Fayad and Todd Lindeman of Moody’s StoryLab.

Senate and House Races in 2026 Midterms

Americans vote in the midterm elections on November 3. On the ballot are all 435 House seats and 35 of the 100 in the Senate. Both chambers now have Republican majorities.

The Guardian mapped where the fight for each chamber of Congress stands. A single choropleth map of the country stays in place as text cards scroll over it. For the Senate, it first shows which party holds each seat on the ballot. Then come the latest Cook Political Report ratings, and only the competitive races stay in color. Next, it zooms into several of the closest races, such as Texas and Iowa. There, the cards add candidates, polling averages, and past results.

For the House, districts take the place of states. One view highlights the nine states that redrew their district lines ahead of the election. A unit chart beside it adds up the potential gains for each party. The last two visuals are line charts of nationwide polls for Congress and of the issues voters see as most important.

👉 See the article on The Guardian, by Chris Stein, Alex Clark, Andrew Witherspoon, and Ashley Kirk.

Michigan Senate Debate in Left- and Right-Leaning Posts

Of the 35 Senate races this year, Michigan’s is one of the closest. Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers, running for an open seat, held their first debate on October 8. Many viewers followed it on social media.

The New York Times charted more than 13,000 posts on X from that evening, split into left- and right-leaning ones. Every post is a circle sized by its views. Its color marks a category, such as foreign policy, the economy, compliments, or personal attacks. All of them run down a vertical timeline labeled every 10 minutes. Those from the left fill one side of a center line, and those from the right the other. Each category gets its own tightly packed stream, and short quotes pick out a few circles. The same view returns three times between passages of text. Together, they follow the evening from 7 p.m., when the debate began, until 8:50 p.m.

👉 Take a look at the article on The New York Times, by Stuart A. Thompson.

Licensed Dogs Across NYC Neighborhoods

Pets are part of everyday life in New York City, from parks and sidewalks to the subway, where they may ride only in a bag or carrier. By law, every dog there needs a license.

Firat Ciftci mapped the 96,459 dogs on New York’s 2026 license records across 197 residential neighborhoods. The opening view colors each area by its most common breed, with an old-style engraving of the winner on top. A click on any neighborhood opens a card that ranks it against the other 196 on several measures.

Other tabs recolor the map by the top names, by counts per home or resident, and by changes over time. The breed and name views each have a second mode, which favors whatever is far more common locally than across the city. Zoom in far enough, and the engravings start riding the subway and other trains along real routes. You can also add your own pet. Four short stories dig into trends with charts of their own.

👉 Explore Every Dog in New York at everydog.nyc.

This has been another edition of DataViz Weekly on the AnyChart blog. In this series, we pick data visualization projects from the web that were hard to forget and offer them as real-world examples, each linked to its original. More than 400 editions have come out since 2017, so the archive has plenty more data visualization examples to discover. Stay tuned for the next one:

👉 DataViz Weekly on AnyChart Blog
👉 DataViz Weekly on Medium

Originally published at https://www.anychart.com on October 23, 2026.

Charts and Maps That Stuck With Us — DataViz Weekly was originally published in Data Visualization Weekly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From the data visualization we keep coming across on the web, some projects catch our attention more than the rest. We save those for DataViz Weekly to show what works in practice.

Here another four to take a closer look at:

• Voters in the U.S. House battlegrounds — The Washington Post
• China’s surplus wind and solar power — Bloomberg
• The age of every building in Paris — Alexander Bogachev
• Sea temperatures around the Pacific Islands — Elia Kabanov

Voters in U.S. House Battlegrounds

Every seat in the U.S. House of Representatives is up for election on November 3. Most of them reliably stay with one party. Control of the chamber is likely to come down to the few dozen where either side could win.

The Washington Post used census data to profile the people living in these battlegrounds. The article starts with a short quiz. Its three questions cover race and ethnicity, homeownership, and the kind of place people live in. Each comes with a dot map of congressional districts. Faint points mark races whose outcome is fairly certain, and the contested ones are highlighted. Color shows which side is favored, and hovering reveals each one’s name and rating. Once you answer, the map transforms into a beeswarm chart. Lined up by the trait in question, the points show how the battlegrounds compare with the rest.

Further into the article, bar charts repeat that comparison for one trait at a time, from homeownership to marriage. They also include the safe and likely seats of both parties, plus Colorado’s 8th District, home to the voter at the center of the story.

👉 Take a look at the story on The Washington Post, by Teo Armus, Clara Ence Morse, and Eric Lau.

China’s Surplus Wind and Solar Power

China has more wind and solar capacity than any other country, and it keeps building at a pace no one else matches. Many of the turbines and panels stand in remote regions, far from the cities and factories that use the most power. Not all the electricity they could generate reaches the grid.

Bloomberg used a Sankey diagram to chart how much wind and solar output goes unused in each province. Every province gets a bar sized by its generation. Gray-blue marks what was produced, and red at the right end shows the losses. Solid red is curtailment reported by officials, and hatching marks an extra share estimated by researchers. Regional groups set the remote energy hubs apart from those near the main centers of demand. Streams flow down from all of them and merge into a national total for the first half of 2026. Smaller bars underneath compare it with the same months of 2024 and 2022.

Further down, the article turns to storage and transmission. Battery capacity appears on a proportional symbol map, ultra-high-voltage lines on a connector map, and pumped-storage plants on a dot map. Each one separates projects in operation from those still to come.

👉 See the article on Bloomberg, by Dan Murtaugh and Jin Wu.

Age of Every Building in Paris

Paris has been built up over many centuries. Its streets mix medieval churches, 17th-century mansions, stone apartment blocks from the Haussmann era, and modern towers.

Alexander Bogachev built a 3D map of all 122,435 buildings in the city, each colored by the period it dates from. Twelve periods run from the Middle Ages to the present, with blues for the oldest and reds for the newest. When the page loads, Paris assembles itself in time-lapse, beginning in the 900s. A timeline of stacked dots along the bottom then lets you pick any year.

Point at any building to see its date, height, and floors, sometimes with a photo. Choose a street, and its two sides line up as parallel rows, labeled with addresses and landmark names. Panorama mode brings you down to ground level, where you can stroll around. A switch also recolors everything by number of floors. Hours can slip by unnoticed.

👉 Explore the map on Alexander Bogachev’s website.

Sea Temperatures Around Pacific Islands

Pacific Island countries and territories are scattered across the largest ocean on Earth. Life there is tied to the sea, from fishing to the coral reefs that shelter the coasts. Ocean heat puts both at risk.

Elia Kabanov plotted sea-surface temperatures around 21 of these countries and territories since 1850. The main view is a diverging column chart made of waffle-like stacks of small squares. Every place gets one per year. Those warmer than their historical average rise above a center line in shades of red, and cooler ones hang below it in blue. In each column, they are ranked by temperature. Over time, the red side grows and the blue one shrinks.

Hovering over a square gives the place and its difference from the average, in degrees Celsius. A caption at the top counts how many were warmer that year. Clicking one, or choosing from a menu, switches to a line chart of that location’s own history.

👉 Check out the project on Elia Kabanov’s website.

That concludes this edition of DataViz Weekly, our regular feature:

👉 DataViz Weekly on AnyChart Blog
👉 DataViz Weekly on Medium

In every edition, we choose data visualization projects from across the internet and present them as examples. Open the originals to see each one in full. Past editions hold many more data visualization examples, and the next installment is already in the works.

Stay tuned.

Originally published at https://www.anychart.com on October 16, 2026.

Visualizing Data on Voters, Energy, Buildings, Temperatures — DataViz Weekly was originally published in Data Visualization Weekly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

DataViz Weekly is back with more data visualization examples. As usual, we have been tracking what the web has to offer and singling out some of the most memorable projects we came across.

Dive into the four below:

• Afterlife beliefs by age — The Pudding
• U.S. tariff exposure across Canada — School of Cities
• Population pyramids from 1950 to 2100 — Karim Douïeb
• American social life in 1995 and 2026 — Data for Progress

Afterlife Beliefs by Age

Most religions teach that something follows death, from heaven and hell to rebirth. In a 2025 Pew Research Center study, belief in life after death ranged from 38% of adults in Sweden to 85% in Indonesia.

Alvin Chang recast answers about the afterlife from a global survey as a room you can walk through. It holds 1,500 respondents from 23 countries, each asked twice, about 18 months apart. You enter through one of three doors, marked no, not sure, and yes, and start among those who gave that answer. Those who said no stand on the left, the unsure in the middle, and believers on the right. The youngest are at the front. Scrolling carries you past older and older people toward a light at the back. Labels over the figures nearby list details such as age, gender, and faith.

A dot plot in the corner maps the whole crowd and marks your place in it. Along the way, the figures and dots switch colors to show responses to other questions, such as how important religion is in daily life. Now and then, line charts appear at the bottom with more detail by age group. An explore mode lets you choose a question from a list and toggle between the 2022–23 and 2024 responses.

👉 Step into the room on The Pudding.

U.S. Tariff Exposure Across Canada

In 2024, about three-quarters of Canada’s goods exports went to the United States. Since 2025, the U.S. has placed tariffs on a growing list of Canadian products.

The School of Cities at the University of Toronto estimated how many local businesses and jobs could be directly exposed to those tariffs. A choropleth map lays out the results by neighborhood or by municipality. Yellow marks the lowest shares, with orange, red, and magenta for higher ones. A menu switches between all affected goods and single categories such as steel, aluminum, autos, lumber, or energy. The color breaks adjust with each pick. Exposure can be measured in businesses, in employees by workplace, or in employees by place of residence. Each comes as a percentage or a total, and totals turn the view into a bubble map with circles sized by count. Hovering over a spot brings up its value.

A companion page ranks 41 metropolitan areas in a bar chart. The project first went online in October 2025, and its estimates were last updated on September 28, 2026.

👉 Explore the tool on Mapping Tariffs, by Muhammad Khalis Bin Samion, Jeff Allen, Yihoi Jung, Tara Vinodrai, and Karen Chapple.

Population Pyramids From 1950 to 2100

The population pyramid dates back to the 1870s. Its name came from the shape most countries had back then. In much of the world, falling birth rates and longer lives have since squared it off.

Karim Douïeb turned the population pyramid on its side and set it in motion from 1950 to 2100. Age runs along the bottom, and a single curve gives the percentage of people at each age, with men and women counted together. Every year gets one such curve. As the animation runs, they stack one behind another along a time axis and build a 3D surface, shaded from blue to red. For the world, the steep early slopes give way to a nearly level line by the end of the century.

A 2D switch collapses the stack into a single line chart. To pick a country, drag the small globe until its crosshair sits on it. Region names under the title step back out to wider areas, and a slider moves through time.

👉 Check out Pyramid Scheme on Karim Douïeb’s klet.app.

American Social Life in 1995 and 2026

We’ve just released AnyChart JS 9.0.0 with a new dumbbell chart type, so we could not resist featuring one in action. This example is about American social life. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General warned of an epidemic of loneliness and isolation.

Data for Progress asked 1,098 U.S. adults how often they had done a range of everyday activities in the past year. It then compared the answers with a 1995 survey that asked the same questions. A single dumbbell chart holds the comparison. Its 20 rows each give the share of adults who did an activity at least once, sorted by the 1995 figure. A dark navy dot marks that year and a light blue one 2026, with a gray line in between.

In most cases, the blue dot sits to the left of the navy one. Attending a class or seminar fell the most, from 54% to 32%, and entertaining at home dropped from 88% to 67%. Five rows go the other way, among them video games, exercise classes, and pop or rock concerts. Internet use leaps to 98%, up from 8%, nearly the full width of the axis.

👉 Take a look at the analysis on the Data for Progress website.

That brings this installment of DataViz Weekly to a close. The series is the AnyChart blog’s running showcase of data visualization examples spotted on the web. Each is summed up in a few paragraphs, with the source a click away. Bookmark the ones worth keeping, and come back for the next batch of examples:

👉 DataViz Weekly on AnyChart Blog
👉 DataViz Weekly on Medium

Originally published at https://www.anychart.com on October 9, 2026.

More Data Visualization Examples to Bookmark — DataViz Weekly was originally published in Data Visualization Weekly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Looking for real-world examples of data visualization done well? DataViz Weekly gathers them on the AnyChart blog.

We pick projects from what gets published across the web and present each one with a short description and a link to the original. Take a look at this edition’s selection:

• A problem gambling experiment on DraftKings — ProPublica
• Expert ratings of fixes for U.S. schools — The Upshot
• Elevation anywhere on Earth — Bert Spaan
• Every vote in Berlin’s 2026 state election — Danila Morkovkin

Problem Gambling Experiment on DraftKings

Since a 2018 Supreme Court ruling, 39 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., have legalized sports betting. Nearly a quarter of Americans now say they have an active sportsbook account. Operators such as DraftKings say they watch for warning signs of problem gambling and close accounts that show too many.

ProPublica had one of its reporters bet like a problem gambler on DraftKings for 10 weeks and charted every wager. A vertical line chart travels with the narrative from the first wager to the last. Bets are counted down the page, while the line swings left or right with his overall loss or gain. Green means he is ahead, red behind. As you scroll, it grows in step with the text, and both axes stretch to fit. A card at the tip gives the time, the latest result, and the running total. Text boxes narrate the turns, and shaded bands flag bursts of microbetting and casino play. Near the end, a winning streak pulls it far to the right before it heads back below zero.

👉 Check out the story on ProPublica, by Jake Pearson, with graphics by Chris Alcantara, data analysis by Ellis Simani, and design by Allen Tan.

Expert Ratings of Fixes for U.S. Schools

Math and reading scores among American students have slipped for about a decade. The slide began before the pandemic and kept going after it. In 2024, high school seniors posted record lows in both subjects on the Nation’s Report Card.

The Upshot at The New York Times asked 37 education scholars to rate 30 ideas for reversing the decline. Each got two marks from 1 to 7, one for how much it would raise achievement and one for how much it would cost. The whole survey fits into one quadrant chart. Each proposal is a dot placed by its two averages. Cost rises to the right and effectiveness toward the top. Center lines divide the grid, so cheap and effective options gather at upper left and expensive, weak ones at lower right. Dots also shift from dark green near the top to dark red near the bottom. A few carry labels, from small group tutoring to private school vouchers, and hovering names the rest.

Shorter ranked tables follow the article’s sections, from the strongest picks to the worst value for money. Both scores sit in shaded cells, and each row opens to a short definition and a comment from one of the experts. A final table holds all 30 and sorts by either one.

👉 Look through the rankings on The New York Times, by Sarah Mervosh, Francesca Paris, and Claire Cain Miller.

Elevation Anywhere on Earth

From the floor of the Mariana Trench to the summit of Mount Everest, the Earth’s surface spans almost 20 kilometers in height. Most landscapes owe their shape to far smaller differences. A river valley may lie just a few dozen meters below the land around it.

Bert Spaan built an interactive map of elevation for the entire world from open terrain data. Its colors are not pinned to fixed heights. The scale stretches over whatever range is on screen, from blue at the lowest point to orange at the highest. The legend updates as you pan and zoom. At the global view, the range covers several kilometers, and the Tibetan Plateau and the Andes glow orange. Zoom in, and the same colors spread over a much smaller span.

Shading from a simulated light source brings out the slopes, with adjustable strength and direction. Settings add contour lines, borders, a 3D view, and the ocean floor. You can also swap the palette or lock and reverse the scale. Presets jump to places such as the Grand Canyon, Mount Etna, and the Mariana Trench.

👉 Explore the map on Bert Spaan’s website, made with help from Jules Schoonman.

Every Vote in Berlin’s 2026 State Election

Berlin elected a new state parliament on September 20, 2026. For the first time, the Left won the largest share of the vote, about 26%. The CDU, winner of the previous election in 2023, came second, ahead of AfD.

Danila Morkovkin mapped all 1,824,514 party-list votes, one point each, on a dot map of the city. Each district’s tally is spread over its residential blocks, more densely where more people live. Magenta marks the Left, teal the CDU, blue AfD, red the SPD, and green the Greens. Seen from afar, the points blend into magenta across the inner city, while the outer districts turn to blues and teals. Zoom in, and the blend breaks back into separate dots.

Pick a name in the legend to hide all the others, or click a district for a small bar chart of its results. A slider changes the viewing angle, and a switch underneath filters for ballots cast at polling stations or by mail.

👉 See the map on Danila Morkovkin’s blog.

In case you scrolled straight to the end, here is the short version. DataViz Weekly is a regular series on the AnyChart blog that rounds up hand-picked new data graphics from all over the web. Each time, we put a few projects forward as examples of data visualization in the wild, with a link to every original. The next edition will bring another set of data visualization examples to explore.

👉 DataViz Weekly on AnyChart Blog
👉 DataViz Weekly on Medium

Originally published at https://www.anychart.com on October 2, 2026.

Hand-Picked New Data Graphics in the Wild — DataViz Weekly was originally published in Data Visualization Weekly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We regularly sift through the data visualization that appears online, choose notable projects, and feature them in DataViz Weekly as examples. This time, all four come from newsrooms. Have a look:

• Anomalies in Russia’s 2026 Duma election results — IStories
• The biggest donors in the 2026 U.S. midterms — The Washington Post
• Waste heat from AI data centers in U.S. cities — Bloomberg Green
• Food self-sufficiency and forests in Indonesia — The Straits Times

Anomalies in Russia’s 2026 Duma Election Results

Russians elected a new State Duma, the lower house of parliament, over three days ending September 20. Official results put United Russia, the ruling party, at about 58%. Independent analysts were quick to question that figure.

IStories, an investigative outlet, ran the returns from polling stations through statistical tests. The scatter plot above shows the stations as dots, placed by turnout and by United Russia’s share. According to experts in election statistics, a fair count would keep most of them bunched in one area. Here a long “comet’s tail” also runs off toward the top right corner.

A stacked area chart then sorts the party’s paper ballots into two layers. Blue is IStories’ estimate of real support. Red, stacked on top, marks the anomalous rest, more than 18 million. Then a line chart (below) is used to compare five presidential and parliamentary elections since 2000. In 2000, the winner’s votes form a single bell. Later curves sprout long tails and spikes near 100%, and the 2026 one flattens into a wide plateau. A dropdown lets you pick out any of the five.

Further on, small multiples catch turnout reports piling up at round numbers, a different one each day. A dot plot flags 11 districts in Dagestan where polling places posted near-identical results. One more line chart traces the gap between the winner and everyone else, and a bar chart covers ballots cast abroad.

👉 Take a look at the analysis on IStories, by Rina Nikolaeva and Timur Khairutdinov.

Biggest Donors in 2026 U.S. Midterms

Russia’s parliamentary election is over. In the United States, the midterms are still ahead, on November 3. Super PACs spending on those races can accept donations of any size.

The Washington Post ranked the 50 biggest donors of the cycle so far, using Federal Election Commission data, and fit all of them into one treemap. Each rectangle stands for a donor, sized by the amount given, and together they pass $1.7 billion. Three blocks sort them by leaning. The Republican side is the largest, in red, at $1.07 billion. The Democratic one follows in blue at $454 million, and special-interest groups take the gray remainder at $248 million. Individuals appear as portraits tinted in their block’s color, and organizations as a small icon. Tiles carry only the amounts. The biggest belong to George Soros, at $102 million on the Democratic side, and to Jeff and Janine Yass, at $95 million on the Republican one.

Profile cards for the top ten individuals and top ten organizations follow, each listing where the money went. A table then covers all 50.

👉 See the article on The Washington Post, by Clara Ence Morse, Leslie Shapiro, Praveena Somasundaram, and Eric Lau.

Waste Heat From AI Data Centers in U.S. Cities

Several of the biggest U.S. political donors this year are tied to artificial intelligence. The industry’s data centers keep multiplying, many of them near American cities. Nearly all the electricity they draw is given off as heat.

Bloomberg Green examined how far that heat travels into surrounding neighborhoods and mapped where the facilities crowd together. First comes a 3D sequence, advanced by scrolling, that moves from a server aisle out to glowing halos over Santa Clara, California. Aerial photos of a CyrusOne campus near Phoenix then switch to thermal imagery. Its rooftop cooling units run past 100°F, while the roofs of homes next door stay at 86°F or below.

The bubble map that follows covers the contiguous United States. Dark red circles stand for clusters of three or more facilities, sized by capacity, and small gray squares mark individual sites. The largest circle sits over northern Virginia. Scroll, and a round satellite inset zooms into Ashburn, its campuses outlined. The next step jumps from 2026 to 2040. Planned clusters join in brighter red and planned sites as hollow squares, while a capacity tally in the legend grows from about 56 gigawatts to about 294. Hovering over any spot brings up details.

👉 Explore the story on Bloomberg Green, by Elena Mejía and Kyle Stock.

Food Self-Sufficiency and Forests in Indonesia

Indonesia grew a rice surplus in 2025, after years of imports. The government now wants to stop buying corn and sugar abroad too. Part of the land reserved for food and energy projects is natural forest.

The Straits Times charted deforestation, crops, and the areas set aside for the government’s programs across Indonesia. A static map marks permanent deforestation from 2001 to 2025 in yellow. Agriculture drove most of it. The yellow runs thickest across Sumatra and Kalimantan, while the far east of the country shows much less. Further down, a scroll-driven version starts from that layer and swaps it for circles on an even grid. Each circle is sized by the land planted with one crop. Rice comes first, in light blue, and covers most of the archipelago. The view then closes in on Sumatra, where corn, in gold, takes over in many areas, and on Papua, where purple marks sugarcane.

Satellite images follow a village forest cleared under a national scheme and then left idle. Other maps outline the three main self-sufficiency programs and the concessions in South Papua.

👉 Check out the story on The Straits Times, by Wahyudi Soeriaatmadja, David Fogarty, Amanda Shendruk, Carlos Marin, Winnie Tan, and Xaquín G.V.

Every Friday, DataViz Weekly picks four notable data visualization projects from around the web and presents them as examples. We keep watching what gets published, from major newsrooms to one-person studios. Next Friday brings four more data visualization examples, wherever they turn up:

👉 DataViz Weekly on AnyChart Blog
👉 DataViz Weekly on Medium

Originally published at https://www.anychart.com on September 25, 2026.

Data Visualization Examples From Four Newsrooms — DataViz Weekly was originally published in Data Visualization Weekly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Data visualization is what we work on the rest of the week. On Fridays, we go through what got published around the web, keep the pieces that hold up, and put them in DataViz Weekly as examples.

Start wherever you like:

• The U.S. electorate ahead of the 2026 midterms — The Economist
• The U.S. economy’s mixed signals — Reuters
• Building ages across 100 cities — Block and Paper
• Travel weather scores month by month — SeasonMap

U.S. Electorate Ahead of 2026 Midterms

The United States holds midterm elections on November 3, 2026. Control of both chambers of Congress is at stake.

The Economist rebuilt the American electorate from 58,000 YouGov poll responses collected since the start of 2026 and turned them into 22 million voter profiles. Those drive a grid of dots that holds still while cards of text scroll over it. One dot stands for tens of thousands of people. The grid opens as a single block covering everyone registered. The marks then scatter and settle into three columns sized by share: Harris voters, Trump voters, and people who did not vote or chose someone else. Two recolorings follow, by approval of the president in 2026 and by stated preference for November. The view narrows to the Trump column alone and splits it by age, then by race. A black outline picks out the block under discussion at each step.

Two charts and a tool sit around that sequence. A bar chart ranks net approval of Trump’s handling of 15 issues in August 2026, all of them below zero and inflation lowest at about 40 points down. A spline chart follows net approval for four demographic groups through 2025 and 2026, its smoothed curves laid over the raw poll readings. The tool assembles a voter from nine dropdowns and returns their modeled chance of backing a Republican.

👀 Take a closer look at the piece on The Economist.

U.S. Economy’s Mixed Signals

U.S. inflation is well below its 2022 peak, and unemployment remains low. Yet wage growth has recently fallen behind inflation, and hiring is weak.

Reuters pairs encouraging economic indicators with measures that complicate the picture. Four pairs of line charts carry the piece, on a dark navy page. Annual inflation comes first, then the same series with wage growth laid over it. The unemployment rate follows, paired with the net share of consumers who call jobs plentiful. Monthly consumer spending comes next, set beside the University of Michigan confidence index. Business outlays on software and computers close it out, against quarterly GDP growth.

👀 Explore the graphics on Reuters, by Prinz Magtulis and Ann Saphir.

Building Ages Across 100 Cities

Cities rebuild themselves in pieces. One block can hold a row of houses from the 1890s and a tower finished in 2015. What stands today is only part of what has stood there.

Block and Paper, a print studio, dated every structure it could in 100 cities, 80 of them in the United States. Each one opens as a field of 3D blocks on a map, one per footprint, colored by the decade it went up. Warm tones mark the oldest survivors, cool tones the newest, one step per decade from 1910 on. Gray covers the ones with no year on record. New York, shown above, has 1.5 million dated footprints out of 1.67 million.

A timeline runs from 1800 to 2026 below. Press play and the buildings rise in the year they were finished. Documented former ones appear in rust and vanish at their recorded demolition year, with dots standing in where no outline survives. A second mode swaps the coloring from age to height, turning the same view into a relief of where the place is tall. Preset views jump to a neighborhood or a landmark, and the whole thing pans and tilts freely. A column chart further down counts the survivors by decade, with a last bar for the undated.

👀 See them all on Block and Paper.

Travel Weather Scores Month by Month

Weather decides a lot about a trip. A place that is pleasant in April can be unbearable in August. Temperature is only part of it, alongside rain, humidity, wind, and air quality.

SeasonMap scored about 1,350 destinations on how good their weather usually is across the year, and by the kind of trip planned. It works from ten years of climate normals, corrected against readings from a nearby station wherever one stands. The result is a heat map of the world. Green marks the places that come out well for the month and travel style selected, red the ones that come out badly, and the gradient runs between. Circles sit over the individual destinations, the strongest carrying their score in a labeled pill.

The controls line the left edge. A strip of months runs across the top, under tabs for what is in season, what events are on, and where to avoid. A dropdown sets the travel style, from city walking to beach, hiking, and snow. World regions are ranked below, each with a twelve-bar strip running January to December in the same colors. A row of buttons above the map switches the coloring from that overall rating to a single measure such as rainfall, daylight, humidity, wind, or air quality.

👀 Check out the map on SeasonMap.

DataViz Weekly is a standing Friday series on our blog. What lands here is real-world data visualization, meaning charts, maps, and interactive graphics built by newsrooms, researchers, studios, and independent developers. We describe what each one shows, and every link goes to the original, which is where it is best seen.

Four more examples land here next Friday. Stay tuned.

Originally published at https://www.anychart.com on September 18, 2026.

Good Data Visualization, Found and Passed Along — DataViz Weekly was originally published in Data Visualization Weekly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Good data visualization gets published constantly, and a lot of it scrolls past before anyone notices. DataViz Weekly is our attempt to slow that down.

Each Friday we pull a few pieces out and set them here as examples, with links so you can go straight to them. Check out our latest picks:

• Heat index days county by county in the U.S. — NYT Opinion
• Visa-free reach of all 199 passports — sheets.works
• Hot spells and hospital deaths in Austria — Complexity Science Hub
• Hajj dates and temperatures in Makkah — Balady Atlas with Méridien

Heat Index Days County by County in U.S.

Summer in the United States now arrives with air purifiers and public health alerts. Camp days get called off on smoky mornings, and people who work outdoors carry cooling vests. Heat, smoke, and flooding together wipe out about a week of youth sports practice a year.

The New York Times Opinion counted how many days a year each U.S. county spends above a heat index of 90 degrees, and how much that has risen in thirty years. The measure folds humidity in with temperature.

The piece opens on a beeswarm plot that changes twice as you scroll. Each U.S. county is a bubble sized by population. They line up by how often the local heat index tops 90 degrees, a measure that adds humidity to temperature. The ones past a 25-day mark are colored, and in the 1986–95 view they hold about half the country’s population. The bubbles then slide to their 2016–25 places, and the colored share reaches roughly 70 percent. In the last view each bubble leaves a trail behind it. The higher a trail climbs, the more that place has gained since 1995.

Two maps close the sequence. The first gives every county an arrow, longer and steeper the more it has gained. The longest run through the South and the Midwest. The second covers the West in smoke, heavier where wildfires have fouled the air more often since 2015.

👉 Take a look at the editorial on The New York Times, with graphics by Gus Wezerek.

Visa-Free Reach of All 199 Passports

Passports do not all work the same. One crosses more than 190 borders with no paperwork filed in advance. Another crosses 22.

Akash Wadhwani photographed all 199 passports in circulation on one day in September 2026 and built a page from them. It opens on a world map, each country drawn as a photograph of the passport it issues. You pick your own country from a dropdown, and the map answers two questions in turn. Where does that passport go without a visa? Those covers stay in full color while the rest fade. And who gets into yours without one? India, the default, enters 55 and admits 6.

Two charts carry the comparison. One is a bump chart tracking rank from 2006 to 2026, all 199 as thin gray lines with a cover photo at either end. Singapore holds first. The United Arab Emirates climbs from 62nd to second. The United States falls to tenth, though it opens more borders than in 2006. Others moved faster. A scatter plot then puts both directions on one grid. Across the bottom is how many countries it enters freely. Up the side is how many it admits in return. A dotted diagonal marks where the two would be equal, and almost nothing sits near it.

Further down sit a wall of every cover, sortable by color, rank, or reach, plus bar charts of what a new one costs and a short history.

👉 Check out the essay on sheets.works.

Hot Spells and Hospital Deaths in Austria

Austrian summers now bring long stretches of heat, and hospitals and ambulance services absorb much of the strain. The old and the already ill feel it first.

HeatProtect, a joint project of the Complexity Science Hub, the Austrian Institute of Technology, and UBIMET, matched projected heat against hospital records across Austria. One map carries the whole opening. Color counts the heat days each place gets. Valleys and basins stand out against the cooler Alps, and white lines mark the districts. A slider moves the decade from 2025–2035 to 2065–2075, and the surface deepens from pale orange to magenta. Triangles then appear, one per district. Each points up where hot spells add hospital deaths and down where they subtract. Bigger triangle, bigger change.

The story then splits by age. Under 45, the triangles stay almost flat. From 65 up, the ones over Vienna, Graz, and Linz shoot off the top. Then the base, for a quick moment, becomes a choropleth map of where older people will be in 2070. Another step ranks disease groups by the extra deaths linked to heat. A second slider switches between a high-emissions future and a low one. A closing section narrows to Vienna, where a third plants meadow and trees.

A separate interactive explorer sits behind it all, so you can pick the figures and the angles yourself.

👉 Explore the story and the dashboard on the CSH website. Liuhuaying Yang built the visualization. Research by Katharina Ledebur, Martin Schneider, Marianne Bügelmayer-Blaschek, Andrea Hochebner, Alexandra Edletzberger, and Daniela Meier.

Hajj Dates and Temperatures in Makkah

Hajj is the pilgrimage to Makkah every Muslim is expected to make once, if health and money allow. About 1.7 million did so in 2026, from 165 countries. Umrah covers much of the same ritual but happens all year, as often as someone likes, with no quota.

Balady Atlas, run by Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Municipalities and Housing, turned Hajj and Umrah into numbers, in graphics by Méridien. It covers who goes, when they go, and how hot Makkah gets while they are there.

The Islamic calendar follows the moon, so the dates fall about 11 days earlier each year. Getting back to the start takes roughly 33 years. The twelve months sit around a circle, and those dates coil through them, one turn per cycle. Each pilgrimage is a small cluster of range columns, one for every day. Each runs from that day’s low to its high, pale when cool and red when hot. In 2025, that ran from about 25°C at night to 43.7°C by afternoon. The 2058 projection runs 31.3°C to 45.0°C. Nights move most. A small chart alongside puts them 5 to 6°C above 30 years ago.

The project holds much more. It opens on the crowd circling the Kaaba, as pale trails that bunch where the press is tightest. A bubble map sizes each country’s quota, and a column chart weighs Umrah’s yearly total against Hajj’s. Annotated diagrams cover the cooling built into the tent city at Mina.

👉 See the project in full on Balady Atlas.

None of this does much sitting in a list, so pick one and open it. The next four examples land here on Friday, in DataViz Weekly:

👉 DataViz Weekly on AnyChart Blog
👉 DataViz Weekly on Medium

Originally published at https://www.anychart.com on September 11, 2026.

Data Visualization Projects to See for Yourself — DataViz Weekly was originally published in Data Visualization Weekly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Take a look at four data visualization projects we selected from around the web. Bringing that kind of work here as examples is the whole idea behind DataViz Weekly. Here they are:

• Record heat and humidity across the United States — The Washington Post
• Signs of AI authorship online — Pew Research Center
• Wages measured in Big Macs — The Economist
• Premier League shirt sponsors since 1992 — Financial Times

Record Heat and Humidity Across U.S.

Summer 2026 has run hot across the contiguous United States. Average temperatures from June 1 to August 29 sat about 2.05 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, past the mark set during the Dust Bowl in 1936. Nights did much of that work, with lows running 2.37 degrees above normal.

The Washington Post set the season against every year back to 1895 in a panel of four area charts, shown above. They cover average temperatures, daily highs, daily lows, and dew points, which stand in for humidity. Each traces the departure from the 1991 to 2020 baseline, filled red above the line and blue below. Lows and dew points make the clearest pair. Both run almost entirely blue into the 2010s, then flip and reach their highest values at the right edge. Highs behave differently. The tallest spikes there belong to the 1930s, and this year sits eleventh.

Two maps follow, one for heat and one for humidity. Each ranks 2026 at every location against the readings from 1895 to 2025 and shades only the places that came in the top three. Denver, Albuquerque, and Miami land inside the warmest areas. The second runs deepest along the Gulf Coast and up the Mississippi Valley, with Los Angeles picked out in the west.

Take a look at the article on The Washington Post, by Ben Noll.

Signs of AI Authorship Online

OpenAI opened ChatGPT to the public in November 2022, and other chatbots followed. Around half of U.S. adults now say they use them, including 24% who do so daily. Much of what these tools write ends up on webpages.

Pew Research Center ran nearly half a million English-language webpages through an AI detection tool and counted how many carry signs of machine authorship. A scroll-driven opening starts with 10,000 gray dots, a random sample of the web in July 2026. About one in ten turns blue as the detector flags it, and the dots reflow into a grid where that tenth stacks along the top. A line chart takes their place. It sits flat near the floor through 2022, then climbs to 9.6% by July 2026. A second one, for pages published after ChatGPT’s release, ends far higher at 35%.

The chart above splits that measure by top-level domain. The four domains sit bunched near 1% until the release marker, then fan apart. The .com share reaches 9.4% and .org 4.6%, while .edu and .gov barely move, ending at 1% and 0.8%. Further on, a chatbot-written paragraph is marked up to show four habits the detectors lean on. A grid of four small line charts then counts each one per 10,000 words, from em dashes to Oxford commas.

Explore the essay on Pew Research Center, by Samuel Bestvater, Aaron Smith, Carson TerBush, Chris Baronavski, and Janakee Chavda.

Wages Measured in Big Macs

Complaints about food prices are common across the rich world. Kebabs in Germany, espresso in Italy, and cabbage in South Korea have all turned into shorthand for the cost of living. Comparing what a paycheck buys from one country to the next is harder, since wages, taxes, and prices all differ.

The Economist priced the average worker’s pay in burgers. It took OECD earnings data, adjusted it for the taxes a single worker without children pays, and divided the result by the local price of a Big Mac. A bar chart opens with the annual count for 32 OECD members. The United States tops it at 10,215 burgers a year, with Switzerland and Australia behind and Mexico last at a little over 2,000.

A slope chart then sets that ranking against an hourly one. The names appear in two columns, annual on the left in the same order as the bar chart, hourly on the right, and a line connects each one’s two positions. Blue marks those that rise once working hours are taken into account, red those that fall, and gray the seven that hold their place. Switzerland moves ahead of the United States at the top, at roughly seven burgers an hour against six. The longest blue climbs belong to Austria, Norway, and Denmark, the longest red drops to Israel, New Zealand, and South Korea.

See both charts on The Economist.

Premier League Shirt Sponsors Since 1992

Premier League clubs voted in 2023 to take gambling brands off the front of their shirts. The ban took effect this summer. Betting firms had held that space at more than half the teams over the previous two seasons.

The Financial Times identified the main front-of-shirt sponsor at every club at the start of each season since 1992 and sorted them by industry. The result is a stream graph with one band per industry, its width the number of teams carrying that kind of deal. Technology and alcohol run wide in the early 1990s. Telecoms, cars, and retail take over through the late 1990s and 2000s. Gambling appears in pink early in that stretch and becomes the largest band for most of the two decades after, reaching 11 of the 20 in each of the past two seasons. At the right edge, the pink closes off. Financials jumps to seven, ahead of technology and travel at four each. A green strip along the bottom tracks the sides that opened a season with the space unsold, two of them this year.

One more interesting graphic narrows to Everton alone. Nine of its kits are drawn in order from 1991 to the deal signed for 2026, each labeled with the company, the years it ran, and the industry it belonged to.

Check out the story on the Financial Times, by Dan Clark and Alan Smith.

Record heat and humidity in the United States, AI authorship across the web, pay measured in burgers, and Premier League shirt sponsors. We went through a lot of new data visualization work over the past days, and these four are the ones we wanted to put in front of you as examples. More next Friday in DataViz Weekly.

Originally published at https://www.anychart.com on September 4, 2026.

Spotlight on Four Notable Data Graphics — DataViz Weekly was originally published in Data Visualization Weekly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We open far more data visualization projects across the week than we can write about, and four of them end up here on Friday.

In DataViz Weekly, we go through each one and the techniques behind it. If you build your own graphics, that is usually the useful part, seeing what someone chose for a particular kind of data and how it works once it is on the page. The four for this time:

• AI homework help and exam scores — The Economist
• Reasons Americans stay out of labor force — Nathan Yau
• English Premier League jerseys since 1992 — Reuters
• 1.8 million NYC trees by genus — Cornell University

AI Homework Help and Exam Scores

Students are using AI in large numbers. Recent polls put the share among undergraduates at 94% in Britain and 93% in Germany. Solid evidence on what it does to learning has been scarce.

The Economist charted findings from a study that tracked nearly 27,000 Chinese pupils aged 12 to 18, about 80% of whom reported using chatbots for schoolwork. Three stacked panels of density curves carry the core result. Each sets the users, before and after they started, against classmates who never did. Homework scores shift up, time per assignment falls by around 20 minutes, and exam scores drop.

Two line charts then locate the penalty. Read against homework score and against time spent on it, the exam drop lands on the pupils who scored highest and finished fastest. Those who worked at the same pace as their classmates lost little.

👉 See the piece on The Economist.

Reasons Americans Stay Out of Labor Force

About 62% of American civilians aged 16 and older had a job or were looking for one in July 2026. Behind that single number, the rate differs sharply by sex and by age, and it has moved over the decades.

Nathan Yau charted who takes part in the U.S. labor force and, for those who do not, the reasons they give. Two line charts of monthly rates from the Current Population Survey set the scene, one by sex and one by age. The men’s rate has fallen since 1984 while the women’s rose and then leveled off, and the middle-career groups hold steady while the youngest and the oldest head in opposite directions. Seasonal spikes in the youngest lines mark summer jobs.

The reasons follow in more line charts, separately for men and for women, with a panel per age group. Seven lines per panel carry the share citing school, care of house or family, retirement, illness and the rest, as annual averages back to 1994. The clearest shift is among younger women, where school has overtaken keeping a household as the main reason by a wide margin. An interactive version closes the post, with dropdowns for sex and age group.

👉 Look at the post on FlowingData.

English Premier League Jerseys Since 1992

Football/soccer shirts are playing kit and retail product at once. England’s Premier League earns more than any other league in Europe, and its clubs put out a new range before every season. Kit and merchandise sales account for roughly a sixth of what the biggest of them take in.

Reuters counted every men’s first-team shirt the 20 clubs of the 2026–27 Premier League have released since 1992, working from Football Kit Archive data. A stacked column chart runs the annual league-wide total, split into home, away, goalkeeper, and pre-match and training jerseys. It climbs from about 50 in the early 1990s to past 200 by 2025. Home and away barely move, so goalkeeper and off-field kits account for the rise. A smaller companion beside it shows shirts carried over from an earlier season falling to almost none.

A grid of small multiples then gives each team its own panel, ordered by revenue. Each is a scatter (dot) plot of its releases year by year, with fitted trend lines for on-field and off-field shirts. Almost all slope up, and the pattern holds well beyond the wealthiest clubs.

Further charts cover the commercial side, among them the colors each club has worn season by season and the kit makers competing for their deals. A final visual closes on price. Every team gets a row, and each short-sleeve shirt on its online store sits on a £30 to £140 axis, colored by type. The authentic versions run far to the right of the replicas of the same shirt.

👉 Check out the story on Reuters, by Mayank Munjal and Sumanta Sen.

1.8 Million NYC Trees by Genus

Tree cover in New York City reaches about 22% of its area, and the target is 30% by 2040. Which species stand where affects how much cooling a block gets, along with pollen and pest risk. The city’s own survey has covered street trees, a small share of the total.

Researchers at Cornell University identified the genus of roughly 1.8 million individual trees across the five boroughs and put all of them on one interactive map. About 1.4 million had never been surveyed on the ground. They combined existing street tree records with satellite imagery and airborne lidar, then trained a classifier that is 82% accurate overall. Every tree is drawn as its own crown outline. Eighteen genera carry a color, among them oak, maple, London plane and honey locust, and anything rarer falls into a gray Other category.

Clicking a genus in the legend isolates it citywide, and clicking a single crown gives its identification, whether it was observed on the ground or predicted, and how sure the classifier is. Further controls separate the surveyed trees from the modeled ones and fade the least certain calls.

👉 Explore the map at nyctreegenusmap.com, put together by Daniel Kata and David Miller. Based on a paper in Scientific Data led by Dave Miller, part of the Cool Trees project led by Arnab Ghosh. You can also read more about the map on the Cornell Chronicle.

DataViz Weekly is our weekly roundup of real-world data visualization examples, published on the AnyChart blog every Friday. Each edition takes four projects and goes through how they are built and which chart and map types do the work. If you make charts, dashboards, or data stories yourself, the techniques are there to borrow. More data visualization examples land here next Friday. All the best, and stay tuned.

👉 Data Visualization Weekly on AnyChart Blog
👉 Data Visualization Weekly on Medium

Originally published at https://www.anychart.com on August 28, 2026.

AI Homework, Labor Force, Jerseys, Trees in Data Visualization — DataViz Weekly was originally published in Data Visualization Weekly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.