FlowingData

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• David Rumsey Map Center, cataloging historical works
• Anonymized data is rarely anonymous
• Covid-19 mortality before and after vaccine eligibility
• xkcd: Unknowable truth

David Rumsey Map Center, cataloging historical works Posted: 29 Dec 2021 09:54 AM PST The David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford houses hundreds of thousands of maps dating back to the 1500s. Andres Picon for San Francisco Chronicle wrote about the collection: At the heart of that endeavor is the digitization of Rumsey's vast physical collection, a project he began in the late 1990s when he launched davidrumsey.com, a constantly growing aggregation of about 112,000 digitized historical maps from his personal inventory. Rumsey, 77, is in the process of donating his entire map collection — more than 200,000 physical maps plus the digital ones — to Stanford so that they can be cataloged for the enjoyment of generations to come. "It's not only a database; it allows people to get lost inside it, no pun intended," he said. "If you make it really usable and accessible the way ours is, it just becomes something different." For preservation, I wish we saw more of this and less blockchain. Hundreds of years from now, how much visualization work is still viewable? You can view a large portion of the Rumsey collection here. You can also browse the data visualization tag to see some of the earliest made charts. Tags: David Rumsey, history, San Francisco Chronicle

Anonymized data is rarely anonymous Posted: 29 Dec 2021 09:26 AM PST Justin Sherman for Wired points out the farce that is anonymized data: Data on hundreds of millions of Americans' races, genders, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, political beliefs, internet searches, drug prescriptions, and GPS location histories (to name a few) are for sale on the open market, and there are far too many advertisers, insurance firms, predatory loan companies, US law enforcement agencies, scammers, and abusive domestic and foreign individuals (to name a few) willing to pay for it. There is virtually no regulation of the data brokerage circus. Tags: privacy, Wired

Covid-19 mortality before and after vaccine eligibility Posted: 28 Dec 2021 09:59 AM PST Denise Lu and Albert Sun for The New York Times show the shifts in Covid-19 deaths among different demographic groups: The change in death rates among groups is starker by race and ethnicity, and the death rate has risen particularly sharply for middle-aged white people. Covid-19 now accounts for a much larger share of all deaths for that group than it did before vaccines were widely available. In a series of slope charts, each multiple shows a group, and the background color indicates an increase (red) or a decrease (gray) in deaths among that group. Tags: coronavirus, New York Times

xkcd: Unknowable truth Posted: 28 Dec 2021 09:21 AM PST xkcd makes Statistics so fulfilling. George E. P. Box comes to mind. Tags: humor, xkcd

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