Yesterday I spent a few hours making a silly, birdy, data-y set of valentines that anyone can share, print, or remix. The valentines show abundance data from eBird. I picked birds whose annual patterns form heart shapes, species which are most frequently found in two separate parts of the year . This is very romantic data.
The two lobes of the hearts – the times of the year where these birds are most abundant – represent the spring and fall migration. In the spring, these little birds, spiffy in their nuptial plumage, are en route to their breeding grounds. This is the noisy migration, when mornings are full of bird song. Love is, very literally, in the air. In the fall migration, newly-fledged young are making their first journeys down to the wintering grounds. Not in a rush like they were on the way North, these autumn migrants will often stay around for a week or two, letting birders get to know them before they continue on. For me, this project was a reminder that data visualization doesn't necessarily need to be a practical endeavor. Sure, we can make charts and graphs to explain, or to reveal, or to clarify. But we can also use them to tell jokes, to foster whimsy, and yes - to proclaim love. Put more simply, data viz can be fun and I think I'd like to find more ways to make it fun.
One of the things I love most about teaching my Binoculars to Binomials class is to watch people discovering (sometimes rediscovering) just how fun making things on the web can be. Making things - even silly little things - should be what the web is all about. Don't mistake the word silly for the word frivolous. These handmade things are meaningful ways to take back ownership in a web era of monolithic apps and anti-imaginative AIs. To hand-code something small and silly on the web is an act of unshittification.
I made these valentines in Glitch which means that you can look at the code and you can also remix it. Yesterday I posted a Bluesky thread walking through the process of making your own bird+data valentines, customized to your own (or your sweetie's) region and favourite species. If today goes well, I'm hoping to make a short video tutorial which I'll post here.
I'd love to see your valentines if you end up making them!
Comments