Coffee Spoons – Examining How We Measure Our Lives

Most Liveable Cities Ranking

There is nothing super sophisticated in these charts, but I love them all the same. The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) published its rankings of the world’s most liveable cities and this year Vienna knocked off Melbourne for top spot. But what about the rest of the list?

Thankfully the Economist, a related company, put together a graphic highlighting important or noteworthy cities among the entire dataset. It is a wonderful tangle of light grey lines that have select cities highlighted in thicker strokes and brighter colours. Labelling each city would be too tricky at this scale.

I’m okay with the occasional rainbow spaghettiThat said about labelling each city, a few years back I worked on a similar top cities in a category datagraphic for Euromonitor International. We took a similar approach and coloured lines by region, but we presented the entire dataset and then complemented it by some additional charts to the side.

These were always fun pieces on which to work

What is really nice about the Economist piece, however, is that they opted not to show the whole dataset. This could be a business decision, if people want to find where a particular city they could be persuaded to either outright subscribe or otherwise provide contact information in exchange for access to the data. Either way, the result is a piece that has space to provide textual context about why cities rose or fell over the years.

I think I like these types of pieces because there is so much to glean from getting lost in the chart. And this one from the Economist does not disappoint.

Credit for the liveability piece goes to the Economist Data Team.

Credit for the destinations piece goes to me.

Insider Tricks

Huzzah. It’s another Friday and we made it. So today, courtesy of xkcd, we can look at some insider tricks for charting best practices.

Just don't give away all of our secrets… — Just don’t give away all of our secrets…

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

The Freedom of the Press

By now you may have heard that this Thursday media outlets across the United, joined by some international outlets as well, have all published editorials about the importance of the freedom of the press and the dangers of the office of the President of the United States declaring unflattering but demonstrably true coverage “fake news”. And even more so, declaring journalists, especially those that are critical of the government, “enemies of the people”.

I have commented upon this in the past, so I will refrain from digressing too much, but the sort of open hostility towards objective reality from the president threatens the ability of a citizenry to engage in meaningful debates on public policy. Let us take the clearly controversial idea of gun control; it stirs passions on both sides of the debate. But, before we can have a debate on how much or how little to regulate guns we need to know the data on how many guns are out there, how many people own them, how many are used in crimes, in lethal crimes, are owned legally or illegally. That data, that verifiably true data exists. And it is upon those numbers we should be debating the best way to reduce the numbers of children massacred in American schools. But, this president and this administration, and certain elements of the citizenry refuse to acknowledge data and truth and instead invent their own. And in a world where 2+2=5, no longer 4, who is to say next that no, 2+2=6.

There are hundreds of editorials out there.

Read one from the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, the Guardian, and/or the New York Times.

But the one editorial board that started it is that of the Boston Globe. I was dreading how to tie this very important issue into my blog, which you all know tries to focus on data and design. As often as I stand upon my soap box, I try to keep this blog a little less soapy. Thankfully, the Globe incorporated data into their argument.

The end of their post concludes with a small interactive piece that presents survey data. It shows favourability and trustworthiness ratings for several media outlets broken out into their political leanings. The screenshot below is for the New York Times.

Clearly Republicans and Democrats view the Times differently

The design is simple and effective. The darker the red, the more people believe an outlet to be trustworthy and how favourably they view it.

But before wrapping up today’s post, I also want to share another bit from that same Boston Globe editorial. As some of you may know, George Orwell’s 1984 is one of my favourite books of all time. I watched part of a rambling speech by the president a few weeks ago and was struck at how similar his line was to a theme in that novel. I am glad the Globe caught it as well.

Credit for this piece goes to the Boston Globe design staff.

The Sinking City of Jakarta

Everyone is probably familiar with Venice, slowly sinking below the Adriatic. But, did you know the city of Jakarta, Indonesia is also sinking?

The BBC published an informative article about the city’s looming problem and the piece includes several nice graphics. The screenshot below is an interactive timeline of the amount of subsidence, or sinking, in the the Jakarta region. It’s been notably worst along the coast. But the striking part are the forecasts for 2025 and 2050 that place the city in danger.

The coastline at the north has experienced the worst of it

Photography of the scale of the subsidence feature throughout the story. And about halfway through is a nice motion graphic piece that attempts to explain the sinking. I am not certain it is the best graphic, after all it references two US NBA stars and I wonder how well known they are. (Whereas everyone clearly knows who David Ortiz is.)

I was aware of Jakarta’s peril, but until reading this article, I had not realised just how imperiled the city really is.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

T Minus 12 Weeks

Today is Tuesday, 14 August. We are now 12 weeks away from the 2018 midterms. That is just three months away. Coverage will only intensify in the weeks to come, and you can be certain that if there are pieces worth noting, I will do that. But to mark the date I went with this choropleth map from the New York Times.

The nation will turns its eyes to you…in 12 weeks

Nothing too crazy here. Likelihood of results colour the districts. The darker the blue, the more solid the Democratic seat. The darker the red, the more solid the Republican one. But what this map does really well is it excludes the likely’s and the solids and sets them to a light, neutral grey. You can still hover over a district if you are curious about where it falls, but, in general those have been excluded from the consideration set because they are not the districts of the most national attention.

Secondly, note the state labels. States like Wyoming that have no competitive seats have no label. After all, why are we labelling things that have no impact on this story, again, the competitive races. Fewer labels means fewer distracting elements in the graphic.

Finally, the piece includes the ability to zoom into a region. After all, for those of us living in urban areas, our districts are geographically tiny compared to the at-large or state-wide seats like in Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Alaska. Otherwise, good luck trying to find the Illinois 5th or Pennsylvania 3rd.

Credit for the piece goes to Jasmine C. Lee.

Ohio 12th Results

Last week parts of Ohio voted for a special election in the 12th Congressional District. Historically it has been a solidly Republican district by margins in the double digits. However, last week Republicans barely managed to hold the seat by, at the latest count I saw, less than one percentage point. Why? Well, it turns out that Republican support is bleeding away from one of the traditional strongholds: suburban counties.

I saw this data set late last week on Politico and I knew instinctively that it needed to be presented in another form than a table. Consequently I sketched out how it could work as small multiples of area charts to highlight just how Republican the district is. This is the digitisation of that take. Unfortunately my original sketch also featured a map of the district to show how this falls to the north and east of the city of Columbus. But I did not have time for that. Instead, I sketched up something else, but I need time to work on that. So for now, this concept will have to suffice.

That flip to the Democrats in Franklin County could be a problem come November

Credit for the piece is mine.

Radiohead in Philadelphia

A week and a half ago my favourite band, Radiohead, played two shows in Philadelphia to close out their 2018 North America tour. I got to see the final of the two shows. And I decided to make this little piece over the weekend. Because it was totally fantastic.

The data shows that the band played a good mix of songs from across their discography. Admittedly they played nothing from Pablo Honey, but with the exception of Creep and Anyone Can Play Guitar along with some of the era’s b-sides, I really do not listen to that album all that often. They also skipped over Amnesiac, but did play five songs from my favourite album, Kid A, so, yeah, again, totally fantastic. Especially those final three songs to close the main setlist. Just brilliant.

Credit for this work is mine.

Joblessness in the Developed World

We have been looking at tariffs a little bit this week, but unfortunately one of the side effects of tariffs is job losses. And of course when it comes to people losing jobs, not all countries in the developed world handle them the same. Last month the Washington Post published an article examining how those countries compare in a number of related metrics such as unemployment compensation, notice for termination, and income inequality.

Not all countries give people the short stick.

It uses a series of bar charts to show the dataset and reveal how the United States fares poorly compared to its peers. The chart above looks at the earning needed for termination from employment and the differences are stark. The outlined bar chart shows longer tenured employees and the full bars as coloured. Of course this makes it look like a stacked bar chart or filled bar chart. Instead I wonder if a dot plot would be clearer. It would eliminate the confusion in determining what if any share of the empty bar is held by the full bar.

The US offers shockingly little assistance to people

The chart for unemployment insurance versus assistance is a bit better. Here the bar represents insurance and the lines assistance. I like how the lines continue off beyond the margins to indicate an unlimited timeframe for assistance. However, for those countries where assistance is short-lived, the bars versus lines again begin to look like an instance of a share of a total, which they are not.

My New Toast

I am a millennial. That broadly means I am destroying and/or ruining everything. It also means I am obsessed with things like avocado toast. It also means I am not buying a house. Thankfully the Economist is on top of my next fad: indoor houseplants.

Your author will admit to having a few: a hanging plant, an Easter lily, an aloe plant and its children, and a dwarf conifer. Just don’t ask me how they’re doing. (Hint: not well.) Turns out I am not a plant person.

In terms of the graphic, though, what we have is a straight up set of small multiples of line charts. The seasonality mentioned in the article text appears quite clearly in a number of plants.

But is Swiss Cheese really a plant?

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.

Apple Hits One Trillion

Last Tuesday we looked at a print piece from the New York Times detailing the share price plunge of Facebook after the company revealed how recent scandals and negative news impacted its financials. Well, today we have a piece from last week that shows how large Apple is after it hit a market capitalisation of one trillion US dollars.

The piece itself is not big on the data visualisation, but it functions much like the Facebook piece, as a blend of editorial design and data visualisation. The graphic falls entirely above the fold and combines a factette and maybe we could classify it as a deconstructed tree map. It uses squares where, presumably, the area equates to the company’s value. And the sum total of those squares equals that of one trillion dollars, or the value of Apple.

In terms of design it does it well. The factette is large enough to just about stretch across the width of the page and so matches the graphic below it in its array of colours. Why the colours? I believe these are purely aesthetic. After all, it is unclear to me just what Ford, Hasbro, and General Mills all have in common. In a more straight data visualisation piece, we might see colour used to classify companies by industry, by growth in share price or market share. Here, however, colour functions in the editorial space to grab the reader’s attention.

The design also makes use of white space surrounding the text, much like the Facebook piece last week, to quiet the overall space above the fold and focus the reader’s attention on the story. Note that the usual layout of stories on the page continues, but only after the fold.

When we keep in mind the function of the piece, i.e. it is not a straight-up-explore-the-data type of piece, we can appreciate how well it functions. All in all this was a really nice treat last Friday morning.

Credit for the piece goes to Karl Russell and Jon Huang.