data visualisation – Page 84

Whip Counts to Authorise Force in Syria

I was catching up on some news tonight and I came upon an unhelpful graphic that was supposed to be helping me understand the whip count (who is voting yes or no) for authorising the use of force in Syria. Below is the original graphic from Think Progress.

The whip count as of 15.30 on 3 September

I struggled, however, to directly compare the yes and no votes. While I certainly understand that the splits within both parties are a fascinating subplot to the greater issue of will we bomb Syria, the traditional congressional arc visualisation is not helpful here. So using the same numbers, I simply plotted what is essentially a stacked bar chart. In truly heretical, i.e. independent, fashion I mixed the two parties together and placed them at either ends of the chart. The first to reach 50% wins. (If I were updating this live of course.)

Credit for the original goes to Igor Volsky and Judd Legum.

Watching Weekday Football (of the American Variety)

Admittedly I am a one-sport kind of guy; baseball is my thing. But I am at least aware that as Labour Day demarcates the border between summer and fall, it simultaneously signifies the beginning of the seasonal transition from baseball to football. (Though I am still pulling to see the Red Sox in October.)

This graphic comes from the New York Times from an article looking at the sports network ESPN. Specifically, the article focuses on the network’s strategy of working with smaller schools desiring national attention to fill in open spaces on their weekly broadcast calendar. In short, weekday nights are not big nights for college football; usually people watch their alma maters on Saturday. But, if your school is willing to make schedule adjustments, ESPN is apparently willing to throw you some money. This interactive bar chart looks at whether your alma mater (or in my case the only university I attended that had sports—yay art school) has begun to play weekday games.

Weekday football by conference and compared to Penn State

Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.

When it Rains…

Today’s interactive piece comes from Axis Philly and it looks at the total amount of rainfall in Philadelphia (1990–2013) to find both which months and what time of day receive the most rainfall.

As it turns out, evenings in the summer months receive the most rainfall. And since 1990, the most rain has fallen between 19.00 and 20.00 in July. A nice complementary piece would have been a small graphic showing total distribution of rain over the months, without segregating the data into hourly chunks. But again, that would have been a nice complement to the piece as it is far from necessary.

Credit for the piece goes to Jeff Frankl, Casey Thomas, and Julia Bergman.

All in the Family (and the Friends and the Neighbours)

Recently my hobby of my family’s history has focused on my Rusyn (or Ruthenian) roots. However, this recent work out of Stanford University piques my interest in my English heritage, even though much of it is very far back in time. Using my 23 × great-grandfather Reynold de Mohun you can begin to see how it links persons within families, how those lives intersected over time, and the geographical areas where that person lived. In Reynold’s case, it was the 12th–13th centuries in Somerset, England.

But as the title kindred implies, this piece is not just about direct family connections, but also the marriages and close cultural links between certainly the elite of British society. Below is how Reynold is connected to King William I, better known as William the Conqueror.

Connecting Reynold de Mohun to William I

Family history or genealogy is a topic ripe for data visualisation and information design because it is all about connections. But I have found beyond the common family tree diagram little interesting has been created. This work is a solid start in the right direction.

Credit for the piece goes to Nicholas Jenkins, Elijah Meeks, and Scott Murray.

Cutting the Cable

We have all heard talk about cutting cable, i.e. unsubscribing from cable television. But the question is what is replacing it if anything? Fortunately, this really nice graphic produced by Quartz shows the market over the course of the last five years.

It is a really nice use of small multiples and the power of not overlapping size and growth charts, or combo-charts, just because you can. Different metrics deserve different charts. The important part is placement, and that’s where a good designer can make sure to place relevant data near its partner.

Credit for the piece goes to Ritchie King.

Mars or Bust…Wait a Minute…

We already got to Mars. At the end of a week of maps and map-related things. Here’s a map of Mars. Well, sort of. It’s more of a map of Mars as explored by Curiosity. (Remember that guy?)

It’s an interactive piece from the New York Times that charts out just where the rover has driven and photographs of the stops along the way. There’s also a nice little chart that shows just how much of the trip has consisted of driving.

Credit for the piece goes to Jonathan Corum and Jeremy White.

Say What?

This map comes from the Washington Post and it uses the American Community Survey to explore languages spoken by Americans at home other than English.

I got stuck (in a good way) on the seemingly random counties of German speakers. After I poked around a bit, I found one where almost 50% of the county speaks German. After some quick investigation, it turns out that Holmes County, Ohio is a centre for the Amish population. The Amish, of course, will often speak German or Pennsylvania Dutch, thus accounting for the abnormally high percentage of German speakers.

Credit for the piece goes to Dan Keating and Darla Cameron.

3D Movie Success

Today’s graphic comes from Thomson Reuters. It charts the success of 3D movies that have been released and how long those movies stayed in the theatres.

Credit for the piece goes to S. Scarr, G. Cabrera, and K. Pong.

Consumer Spending by Store Type

Today’s post is a small interactive from the Wall Street Journal that allows the user to explore consumer spending not by category of spending, but rather the type of store in which they are spending, e.g. grocery retailers. Consumer spending is a fairly important measure of the US economy since so much of our economy depends upon it (I want to say roughly two-thirds, but I cannot recall exactly).

Comparing retail spending by type of store

This piece has a few interesting things going for it. Firstly is the ability to compare and contrast three different retail channels (My screenshot compares only two). An unlimited amount would have been far too many, but three is a manageable number, especially in the various charting components used.

The tree map is interesting. I like the idea of using them, but I am not sure this is the best application. First, a tree map is fantastic for showing hierarchy. If, for example, there were sub-channels of the big retailing types, they could be nested within, well, squares or rectangles. But here the size and growth could have been compared perhaps more easily in a scatter plot. Secondly, I cannot determine the order for which the channels have been arranged. Clearly it is not by size, because the small ones are near the top. Nor is it reverse, because there are smaller ones where there should be larger ones.

Then the bar chart. An interesting idea, to be sure, of aggregating the sales per channel to see their total value. But if the goal is to compare them, would not a line chart looking at both separately not in aggregate show size and relative gains/declines against the other?

Credit for the piece goes to Dan Hill.

Road Kill

Driving can be dangerous. But perhaps most so in the developing world. The Pulitzer Center created this interactive map to allow users to explore just how dangerous driving can be.

Little windows provide details on countries the user rolls over. This data looks at deaths per 100,000 people, killer/victims, and lastly a rating of law enforcement across several different issues. The map also includes links to stories on the website as well as an information panel that related small bits of information about selected countries.

Credit for the piece goes to Tom Hundley and Dan McCarey.