Gallery: animated What We Ask Google graphics
Nigel Holmes illustrations animated by Rowland Holmes Nigel’s illustrations for What We Ask Google are so alive and enticing, we wondered what they would look like as animations. So, here’s a selection:
Simon Rogers
Data storytelling and journalism in the age of AI
Latest posts
Peeking Inside the World’s Brain: new UK Event Dates
I’m heading back to the UK at the end of the month for my new book, What We Ask Google: A Surprisingly Hopeful Picture of Humankind. We’ll be diving into the world’s biggest publicly available dataset to see what it tells us about who we really are. From the delightfully mundane questions we ask every […]
Why Grief Feels So Lonely—And Why the Data Proves We Aren’t
It's Mother's Day this weekend in the US and I wrote a piece for Literary Hub exploring what turns out to be one of the most profoundly isolating experiences we go through as humans: grief.
New event: Join me live in San Francisco, May 6
Bay Area friends! 🌉 I’m thrilled to be at Book Passage in San Francisco on May 6th to discuss my new book, WHAT WE ASK GOOGLE, with the incredible Clara Jeffery. We’ll be diving into what our search history reveals about us—the profound, the mundane, and everything in between. 📍 Save the date! Hope to […]
Data + Birds = Beauty
Birdwatching is getting really popular: 96 million people in the US are birders and that produces a lot of Search data. And that means there is a lot of potential for beautiful data visuals (a great example is Jer Thorp’s work in the field). So, when Nadieh Bremer told Alberto and I that her next […]
New podcast alert: Data journalism in the face of ICE and subzero temperatures in MN
MaryJo Webster is data editor at the Minnesota Star Tribune. She joins Alberto, Scott and Simon to talk about her team’s ongoing coverage of federal immigration troops deployed in Minnesota. They discuss analyzing data in a breaking news environment, and what reporters in other places can learn from the Star Tribune’s approach. Subscribe to the […]
New pages from ‘What We Ask Google’
See sample pages from the upcoming book What We Ask Google, with illustrations by Nigel Holmes
New podcast episode: Data storytelling in 2026
As a new year begins, we reflect on the state of data journalism. We discuss our dataviz favorites from 2025 and what Alberto, Scott and I are working on in 2026. What will happen in data visualisation and journalism this year?
Breaking New Ground with the Straits Times
How hawker signboards tell the story of Singapore NEW POD EPISODE: The Straits Times is Singapore’s most widely read print newspaper, and its online presence is full of innovative data visualization projects. Our guests this week — Charlene Chua, Hannah Ong, and Stephanie Adeline — are three of the young journalists making it happen. They […]
New podcast episode: Charts as Political Theater
This was a fun podcast episode to record – although my power outage resulted in the action shot above! Not since Ross Perot’s famous TV presentations using cardboard charts have we had a national figure who uses data visualization props quite like Donald Trump. This week, Philip Bump joins Scott and Simon to talk about […]