We teamed up with Data to Dream and ACLU TX to build a tool to educate people about Houston’s budget and encourage them to contact their City Council members. In June, they will vote on how much money each department will receive for the Fiscal Year 2023.

We think that residents should be in charge of their budget, and that existing tools are simply insufficient. Accessible, simple, and engaging tools can onboard residents to their budget, catalyze civic participation, and make for a more collaborative and transparent city.

A group of journalists at the NYT have published this piece, exploring how the country could have prevented the COVID-19 death toll from reaching one million.

By using photographs, charts, and a dot density map, they show how variants of COVID-19, lack of government action, and vaccine hesitancy have played a role in spreading the virus around the country and killing the most vulnerable populations.

The piece also generated some controversy among the data visualization community. It’s worth diving deeper into what advanced practitioners are saying: read this thread 🧵 from Francis Gagnon, this thread 🧵 from Will Chase, and this thread 🧵 from Amanda Makulec.

Alyssa Fowers and Leslie Shapiro from the Washington Post have teamed up to humanize the data behind COVID-19 deaths.

Every sentence fragment represents a person whose life was cut short due to the pandemic—the reader can hover to view the complete sentence. In contrast to the above piece, which does a great job showcasing the magnitude of the death toll so far, this piece humanizes individual lives that were cut short.

The data team at USA TODAY has investigated the state of adoptions and foster care in the United States, and visualized their findings in this interactive article.

The article’s visualizations are included in a video that plays and pauses based on the user’s scroll position, making for a scrollytelling experience that enables a variety of chart types.

You can read more about the methodology from the USA TODAY team here, or see the code on GitHub here.

Nathan Baugh, the writer behind the newsletter World Builders, has co-written this Twitter thread with Zain Kahn.

They focus on how three global companies—Apple, Nike, and Disney—share the common trait of being great storytellers. They provide 10 tips, from appealing to emotion to keeping it focused, which can improve your visual storytelling skills to help captivate an audience and get your message across.