Bad Endings

Turns out I was not the only one to look at plotting the ratings of the final series of Game of Thrones. The Economist looked at IMDB ratings, but just prior to the finale on Sunday. They, however, took it a step further and compared Game of Thrones to the final series of other well regarded shows.

All good things…
All good things…

From a design standpoint, I’m not a huge fan of breaking the y-axis at 6. While the data action is all happening at the high range of the scale, that is also the point. Each show is at the top of its class, which makes the precipitous falls of Game of Thrones, Dexter, and House of Cards all the more…wait for it…stark.

I do like the shading behind the line to indicate the final series. That certainly makes it easier to differentiate between the final episodes and those that came before.

But again, I’ll just say, I like how Game of Thrones ended.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.

Trade War Retaliation

About a week and a half ago the Economist published an article about the retaliatory actions of the European Union and China against the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration. Of course last week we had a theme of sorts with lineages and ancestry. So this week, back to the fun stuff.

What makes today’s piece particularly relevant is that over the weekend, Trump announced he might increase the tariffs proposed, but not yet implemented, upon Chinese goods. So some economists looked at the retaliatory tariffs proposed by the EU and China.

Ultimately Trump's tariffs are not paid by foreign governments, but by US citizens.
Ultimately Trump’s tariffs are not paid by foreign governments, but by US citizens.

Each targets Trump voters, albeit of different types. But China appears more willing to engage in a brutal fight. Its tariff proposal would not just harm Trump voters, but would also harm Chinese citizens. The EU’s plan appears tailored to maximise the pain on Trump voters, but minimise that felt by its own citizens.

A few minor points. I like how the designers chose to highlight high impact categories with colour. Lower impact shares are two shades of light grey. But after that, the scale changes. I wonder how the maps would compare if each had been set to the same scale. It looks doable as the bottom range of the maximum bin is 6% for the EU and 8% for China. (Their high limit is much higher at 22% compared to the EU’s 10%.)

That said, it does a good job of showing the different geographic footprints of the two retaliatory tariff packages. Tomorrow—barring breaking news—we will look at why that is important.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.

Who Bettors Think Will Sit Upon the Iron Throne

Last night was the third episode of the final series of Game of Thrones and thus marked its midway point. I shall save you from any spoilers, but I thought we could do a lighter post to start the week. This comes from the Economist and simply plots the characters and their implied probability of winning the Iron Throne.

What about Young Griff?
What about Young Griff?

For me, there are too many lines, too many colours and we get the usual spaghettification. But, c’mon, it’s a chart about Game of Thrones. That said, some small multiple grid of characters, sorted by probability would be pretty neat.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist’s graphics department.

50 Shades of Tory Blue

It is Monday, so it must be another Brexit vote day. And today we have Indicative Vote Day 2. If you recall from last week, the House of Commons wrestled control over parliamentary business away from the government and created a two-step process to try and see if any alternative to Theresa May’s Brexit plan can receive a workable, sustainable majority in the House.

The first step went about as well as could be expected. Nothing received a majority, but a customs union and a confirmatory vote by the public on the final deal both came very close to a majority: 8 and 27 votes, respectively. Likely, the vote today will be on those options.

But one reason for this lack of majority is that the idea of Europe has always fractured the Conservative Party. And in a recent piece by the Economist, we can see just how fractured the Tories have become.

The Tories are all over the plot
The Tories are all over the plot

Maybe a little bit counterintuitively, this plot does not look at an MP’s opinion on Brexit, but just with whom they are more likely to vote. The clearest takeaway is that whilst Labour remains relatively united, the Tories are in a small little divisions across the field.

In terms of design, there is not much to comment upon. It is not a scatter plot in terms of the placement of the dots does not refer to Brexit opinions, as I mentioned. It is more about the groupings of MPs. And in that sense, this does its job.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.

The Rise of White Nationalist Terrorism

Whilst I was on holiday, a terrorist killed nearly fifty people in Christchurch, New Zealand. Except this time, he was a white man and the victims were all Muslims. Admittedly, I really did not read much about it until I returned to the States, but it clearly is not a thing I was expecting out of New Zealand. But the Economist looked at the question of whether this shooting is more of another in a pattern or a one-off.

Too many dots for my comfort…
Too many dots for my comfort…

The graphic does a fairly good job of showing the increasing frequency of right-wing/white nationalist terror attacks. From a design standpoint, the nice touch is the use of transparency to show overlapping events. For example, the concentric circles for Utoya and Oslo show the two Anders Breivik attacks in Norway.

You could arguably say the treatment begins to fail, however, in the US/Canada timeline. Here, regrettably, there are often too many attacks in too close proximity that the dots are too overlaid. Here I wonder if some other method of stacking or offsetting the incidents could work.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist data team.

Regions of German Nationalism

The Economist has an interesting piece looking at the areas of support for the far-right AfD German political party, arguably a neo-fascist nationalist party. It turns out that

Historical analogies are dangerous, but fascinating.
Historical analogies are dangerous, but fascinating.

The piece does a great job of setting the case through the demographics map at the top of the piece. It shows how the two areas where the largest AfD support experienced the least changes from prior to the war. And with those demographics in place, the support for hardline nationalism might still be present, as is indicated by the support for the AfD.

In terms of the municipality maps, I would be curious if the hexagon tile map is because those borders have changed. Obviously 84 years can change political boundaries.

But I wonder if a single map could have been done showing the correlation between the 1933 vote and the 2017 vote. Of course, the difficulty could well be in that political boundaries may have changed.

And of course, we should not go so far as to compare the AfD to Nazism.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.

Where’s All the Oil Going?

Hint: not China.

Today’s piece is a nice little graphic from the Economist about the oil and natural gas industry in the United States. We have a bar chart that does a great job showing just how precipitous the decline in Chinese purchases of oil and liquid natural gas has been. Why the drop off? That would be the trade war.

Will they take it? For all the tea in China?
Will they take it? For all the tea in China?

The second graphic, on the right, is far more interesting. The data comes from BP, so the proverbial grain of salt, but it compares expected GDP and demand for energy by source from a baseline model of pre-Trumpian trade war policies to a future of “less globalisation”. Shockingly (sarcasm), the world is worse off when global trade is hindered.

You all know where I stand on stacked bar charts. They are better than pie charts, but still not my favourite. If I really want to dig in and look at the change to, say, coal demand, I cannot. I have to mentally remove that yellow-y bit from the bottom of the bar and reposition to the 0 baseline. Or, I could simply have coal as a separate bar next to the other energy sources.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.

Individualistic Immigrants

As many of you know, genealogy and family history is a topic that interests me greatly. This past weekend I spent quite a bit of time trying to sort through a puzzle—though I am not yet finished. It centred on identifying the correct lineages of a family living in a remote part of western Pennsylvania. The problem is the surname was prevalent if not common—something to be expected if just one family unit has 13 kids—and that the first names given to the children were often the same across family units. Combine that with some less than extensive records, at least those available online, and you are left with a mess. The biggest hiccup was the commonality of the names, however. It’s easier to track a Quinton Smith than a John Smith.

Taking a break from that for a bit yesterday, I was reminded of this piece from the Economist about two weeks ago. It looked at the individualism of the United States and how that might track with names. The article is a fascinating read on how the commonness or lack thereof for Danish names can be used as a proxy to measure the individualism of migrants to the United States in the 19th century. It then compares that to those who remained behind and the commonness of their names.

But where are the Brendans?
But where are the Brendans?

The scatter plot above is what the piece uses to introduce the reader to the narrative. And it is what it is, a solid scatter plot with a line of best fit for a select group of rich countries. But further on in the piece, the designers opted for some interesting dot plots and bar charts to showcase the dataset.

Now I do have some issues with the methodology. Would this hold up for Irish, English, German, or Italian immigrants in the 19th century? What about non-European immigrants? Nonetheless it is a fascinating idea.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.

A Macedonia by any Other Name

As someone who loves geography and maps, I have plenty of printed atlases and map books. One year, as a gift, my family gave me an early 20th century atlas. That one in particular is remarkable because of how much the world changed between 1921 and 2019—what was French West Africa is now several independent countries.

But our maps may be changing again as Greece has now formally recognised the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia as North Macedonia, what most of the world simply calls Macedonia. But Greeks do not want you to confuse that Macedonia with the Macedonia (or Macedon) of Ancient Greece and Alexander the Great. The squabble over the name has prevented what will be North Macedonia from joining the European Union and NATO because of Greek objections.

As the Economist recently showed, however, it might take a little while before the name Macedonia catches on with the public at large. (Note, I intended to type North Macedonia but instead went with Macedonia. I opted to leave it incorrect just to show how difficult it will be.)

What's in a name?
What’s in a name?

The plot uses my favourite small multiples to look at six countries whose names have changed. Some of you may be unfamiliar with the originals. Bechuanaland may be the most obscure, but Burma and Ceylon may be far more familiar. Of course the historian in me then wonders why the mentions of countries spiked in books. But small multiples are usually not the place to do detailed annotations to humour an audience of one.

In terms of its design, we have an effective use of colour and line. I may have dropped the thin red line for the max 100 value as it makes the piece a bit busy overall, but that might just be house style.

Of course for this graphic in particular, we will have to wait several years before we can add Macedonia/North Macedonia to the plot.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.

A Not so Dry January

January has ended, and with it for, apparently, a very few Britons, Dry January. The Economist looked at alcohol consumption, using a proxy of beer sales, and compared that against the number of times people searched for “Dry January” on Google.

Not so dry after all…
Not so dry after all…

What I really like about this chart is that it does not try to combine the two series into one. Instead, by keeping the series separate on different plots, the reader can clearly examine the trends in both searches and consumption.

You also run into the problem of how to overlay two different scales. By placing one line atop the other, the user might implicitly understand that as higher or better than the lower series when, one, that may not be true. Or, two, the scales are so different they prevent the direct comparison the chart would otherwise imply as possible.

Here, the designers rightly chose to separate the two plots, and then highlighted the month of January. (I also enjoy the annotation of the World Cup.) I might have gone so far as to further limit the palette and make both series the same colour, but I understand the decision to make them distinct.

But, overall, as the piece points out, drinking in Britain seems to correlate to the weather/temperature. People go out to the pubs more on warmer days than colder. But regardless of any post-holiday hangover, they still consumer beer in January.

I’ll drink to that.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.