I’ve been away for over two weeks on holiday. So to spread good cheer to all, today I am sharing an image from a series of maps the BBC put together to try and explain the civil war in South Sudan.
Credit for the piece goes to BBC graphics department.
Well, travel for the teams, not you. It’s a big issue in Brazil because unlike the last couple of times, the teams need to travel big distances to reach the cities where they play their matches. Thankfully, to explain just how far some of these distances are for some of these teams, Quartz put together a nice article with quite a few graphics.
This graphic in particular juxtaposes the travels of the US team and the Argentinian team. Who do you think has it easier?
Credit for the piece goes to Jason Karaian and Ritchie King.
Most of us have likely seen the wind map by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg. However, this new wind map takes the idea and makes it a bit more useful. It offers the user the opportunity to look at winds at different levels of the atmosphere. Or you can look at different projections. Some projections show wind patterns better than others. You can also see wind across the world, not just the United States.
The New York Times has a nice piece about the Arctic, which is increasingly fought over by the nations north of the Arctic Circle. Maps like these are always opportunities I enjoy to see the world in an infographic that is not a standard projection, e.g. Mercator or Robinson. The slight change in fill or opacity also serves to highlight the focus of the piece on the area north of the Arctic Circle while areas even more distant slowly fade to white.
Credit for the piece goes to Baden Copeland and Derek Watkins.
Today’s post comes via Business Insider. They linked to work by reddit user sp07 who mapped out words used for common objects across Europe and then looked at those words by their origin. But of all words, this is probably the most important.
On 8 November, Typhoon Haiyan made landfall in the Philippines, killing what may well be 10,000 people. The New York Times covered much of the damage in Tacloban, perhaps the hardest hit city, in this interactive graphic.
Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.
Yesterday, we looked at the new Conservative Party of America. But those are the votes that John Boehner fears to upset—and possibly fracture his party and cost him his job—if he should let a clean budget resolution come to the floor and should it pass. But why would it pass if it needs 217 votes and there are only 200 Democrats? Well, now we have a nice interactive graphic from the Washington Post that explores the moderate Republicans. Which, if this count is accurate, would provide enough votes when combined with Democrats to pass a clean budget.
Why are these Republicans in favour of a clean budget resolution? The y-axis shows that they are in moderate or mixed congressional districts, i.e. not Conservative districts. The x-axis shows that a fair number of these moderates have a high proportion of federal workers within their respective district. And who’s not working/earning money during the shutdown? Yep, a lot of federal workers.
Credit for the piece goes to Aaron Blake, Dan Keating, Ted Mellnik, and Darla Cameron.
This map by Dorothy Gambrell looks at US state borders formed by natural, well, borders. None of those lines drawn by a bunch of old men wearing wigs. What I really like is how those artificial borders are drawn as a thin grey line and labelled as “just some line”.
After two weeks out of the country, I come back and find early this morning (thanks, jet lag) an interactive article published by the New York Times on income mobility. What does that mean? From a medium side, a long narrative interspersed with charts and graphics with which the user can interact to uncover specific data about specific elements in the dataset. From a content side, income mobility means the movement of an individual from one group of money earned to another, e.g. a poor person becoming a millionaire. The piece is fantastic and you should take the time to go read and interact with it.
For some time now I have harped on about the need to annotate and contextualise datasets. Too often, large datasets paralyse people; their eyes glaze over and they simply gaze at a graphic without seeing the data, the story, the information. Little notes and blurbs of text can help people synthesise what they see with what they read with what they know to gain better understanding. But in this piece, by combining a lengthy article—very well written although that is not the focus of this post—with powerful interactive maps and graphics, the New York Times has created a powerful piece that states and then proves the point of the article. And while doing all of that, by making the datasets explorable, the Times also allows you to find your own stories.
Lastly, in the credits section at the end you will see this piece required the input of eight individuals (though I know not in what particular capacities). Clearly, for the Times this is not about to become a regular type of infographic/datavis/journalism piece. But when will skill sets be democratised or dispersed enough that smaller teams can create similar scale projects? That will be interesting to see. However, the Times certainly leads the States if not the world in some of the best information design pieces and undoubtedly this will push other publishers of similar content in this direction.
Credit for the piece goes to Mike Bostock, Shan Carter, Amanda Cox, Matthew Ericson, Josh Keller, Alicia Parlapiano, Kevin Quealy, and Josh Williams.
Ever wonder what neighbourhood you really live in? In every city I have ever visited, neighbourhoods have clear cores but murky, fuzzy borders. Last year, bostongraphy.com took a stab at defining Boston’s neighbourhoods with a survey. If you read through the description and don’t just look at the pretty pictures, you will see they talk a bit about the methodology, which is quite nice. But either way, here’s a map of Boston’s neighbourhoods.
And the phrase that wins the day: “…hexagons had slightly more carto-hipster cachet.”