Earlier this summer I looked at a graphic by Thomson Reuters that compared life expectancy changes across the world from 1990 to 2011. Last month, the Washington Post published an interactive graphic that explores life expectancy (along with obesity and physical activity) across the United States from 1985 to 2010.
Changes in female life expectancy
What I really enjoy about the piece is that each toggle for the health condition, i.e. life expectancy, obesity, physical activity, the text beneath swaps out to explain what the story is. Context is key. But then the ability to flip between the actuals and the growth for both men and women allows the user to really explore the data. And to see that growth or lack thereof is not even across the sexes.
From the design side, a minor point worth noting is the use of different colour palettes based on the mapped metric. The actual values (with the greater range) use a darker green-blue and tint that down whereas the growth values (all of three conditions) are in a different palette. Here it works, though I am more accustomed in similar pieces to seeing the swapping of palettes for changes in the mapped metric.
Beneath the big map, however, are two components also well worth the user’s attention. Perhaps deceptively simple, two sets of line charts, they add (again) context to the data. For example, while it is great to see life expectancy in the United States improving, when you compare that to the rest of the developed world, we are falling behind.
Overall a solid piece.
Credit for the piece goes to Patterson Clark, Kennedy Elliott, and Katie Park.
If you look at senators who voted with other senators at least 50% of the time and at least 75% of the time, and compare those numbers to numbers over a decade ago, you can see there is a lot less bipartisanship in 2013.
Compare 2013…
75 percent shared votes in 201350 percent shared votes in 2013
to 2001.
75 percent shared votes in 200150 percent shared votes in 2001
The Supreme Court issues its rulings usually on, if I recall, Mondays and Thursday. And you know what today is, right? One of the last Thursday sessions of the current sitting. So…if not this week then next week the Supreme Court will (likely) rule on several big, hairy, tangly cases. One of those issues, but two of the cases, is same sex marriage. Specifically, a ruling on California’s Proposition 8 and another on the Defence of Marriage Act.
Thankfully, the Washington Post has a great interactive piece that attempts to simplify and explain just how the possible rulings on each of the two cases would impact same sex marriages in all fifty states. Click around and read the explanations to see just how complicated the cases are, especially Prop 8.
Just one of the different outcomes
Credit for the piece goes to Masuma Ahuja, Robert Barnes, and Emily Chow.
In today’s post we look at a small interactive piece from the Washington Post. Everybody pays taxes. And everybody seeks to find ways to pay less in taxes. This interactive stacked bar chart (and bar matrix) examines how much the different available tax benefits help Americans, grouped into income quintiles. The measure is dollars, not percentage of income (either personal or national), so clearly highest income Americans are the big winners in tax benefits while low income Americans lose out. For example, most low income people do not make enough money to invest in the stock market. Therefore they cannot reap the benefit of preferential tax treatment of dividend income as opposed to wage income.
Privacy is the hot topic these days. And in this interactive piece from the Washington Post, we can see which state and federal agencies may have your photograph to run face recognition software without your arrest. The bubble chart, which is broken into four different levels of search permissions, maps out how many photographs are stored. Beyond that, however, the piece personalises the story by asking you a few simple questions to reveal just who may very well have your face. Below is where my ugly mug is stored.
My photograph can likely be found in red.
Credit for the piece goes to Darla Cameron and Craig Timberg.
The Washington Post looked at the testing of the first atomic bomb at White Sands. Nuclear weapons are a topic on which I have done some work in the past. But this piece looks more at the historic test called Trinity.
Trinity Test
Credit for the piece goes to Alberto Cuadra and Laris Karklis.
Bryce Harper is undoubtedly one of the best baseball players in the game today. To put it simply, he hits. And he hits well. And he hits well often. So the Washington Post put together an interactive, long form piece about Harper’s swing and hitting.
Pitching to Bryce Harper
The piece begins with a narrated video outlining the science behind Harper’s swing. Then the reader can down into the piece and learn more about Harper’s history and development and how he compares to other hitters. Statistics and data visualisation pieces show just how impressive Harper is as a hitter and how pitchers are trying to combat that.
Interactive long form articles are appearing more and more often online. But this is perhaps the most data- and science-intensive piece I have seen thus far. What is particularly nice about the format is that, as I have often noted, annotations and explanations are what make good infographics and what move data visualisation from presentational to informational. That this piece in particular happens to be about baseball, well, all the better.
Credit for the piece goes to Adam Kilgore, Sohail Al-Jamea, Wilson Andrews, Bonnie Berkowitz, Todd Lindeman, Jonathan Newton, Lindsay Applebaum, Karl Hente, Matthew Rennie, John Romero, and Mitch Rubin.
On Tuesday I shared with you some work by Jonathan Corum at the New York Times on the 17-year cicadas now starting to emerge back east. (And as I recall from my childhood, I assure you that they are quite loud.) Today we look at an illustration of the cicada life cycle via the Washington Post.
As I discussed the other day about other graphics, there are differences in how the two newspapers are presenting the same topic or subject matter. The New York Times piece concerns itself with the emergence over time of cicadas across the United States and links to historical articles about those events. Here, however, the Washington Post instead explains just how you get a seventeen-year period between emergences.
Additionally, the Washington Post maps near the end are not interactive as in the New York Times piece. But what this allows the Post to do is focus on those broods that impacted the Washington area instead of all those areas likely outside the Post’s core readership.
The Washington Post's explanation of the periodical cicadas
Yesterday both the New York Times and the Washington Post published fascinating pieces looking at the difference in the cost of medical procedures. But each took a different approach.
I want to start with the New York Times, which focused at the hospital level because the data is available at that level of granularity. They created a geo-tagged map where hospitals were colour-coded by whether their bills were below, slightly above, or significantly above the US average.
Hospitals across the United States
The ability to search for a specific town allows people to search for their hometown, state, country and then compare that to everyone else. My hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania is fortunate—or perhaps not—to have several hospitals in the area that charge at different rates. That makes for an interesting story. But I am from the densely populated East Coast and someone from say rural Montana might not have the same sort of interesting view.
Hospitals near West Chester, Pennsylvania
Regardless of the potential for uninteresting small-area comparisons, once you find your hospital, you can click it to bring up detailed statistics for procedures, costs, and comparisons to the average.
Brandywine Hospital's data
All of this makes for a very granular and very detailed breakdown of hospital versus hospital coverage. But what if you want something broader? What good is comparing Brandywine Hospital to some medical centre in Chicago? Neither is reflective of the healthcare industry in the Philadelphia area or the Chicago area, let alone Pennsylvania or Illinois. The Washington Post tackles this broader comparison.
The Post leads off with a hospital-level example from Miami. Two hospitals on one street have vastly different prices. If we knew about this in Miami we could surely find that in the New York Times map. Instead, the Post guides us to that kind of example.
Comparing two hospitals in Miami
But the broader view is the centre of the piece. Using dot plots and filters, the user can compare the state averages for 10 different medical procedures. Fixed to the plot are the minimum and maximum averages along with the national average. And given the Post’s smaller circulation area—the New York Times is national, the Post is less so—there are quick links to states of particular interest: DC, Maryland, and Virginia.
Pennsylvan's averages
The ability to pick different states from the drop down menu allows the user to quickly see differences between states. What is lacking is perhaps a quick view of where all the states are visible so that the user does not have to click through each individual state.
California's averages
Both pieces are very successful at their narrowly-focused aims. Neither tries to do everything all at once, but nor would their designs allow for it. Plotting and filtering all the hospitals could be done in the Post’s style, but it would be messy. The state averages could all be made to colour state shape files, but you would lose the inter-procedure differences, the minimums, maximums, and the averages. In short the two pieces from the two teams complement each other very well, but a weird and hybrid-y cross of the two would be large, cumbersome, and potentially difficult to use without spending a lot of time to design and develop the solution. (Which I imagine they did not have.)
Credit for the piece from the New York Times goes to Matthew Bloch, Amanda Cox, Jo Craven McGinty, and Matthew Ericson.
Credit for the piece from the Washington Post goes to Wilson Andrews, Darla Cameron, and Dan Keating.
After the capture this weekend of the second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing, the Washington Post published an interactive piece that looked at the entirety of the story. It captured the bombing, looked at the investigation, then the manhunt, and finally the capture of one of the suspects.
The piece incorporated static diagrams along with video and interactive navigation to tell the story in day-sized chunks on the screen. When taken together as one whole piece, it is quite impressive.
The capture of one of the suspects
Credit for the piece goes to what may well be the entire graphics staff of the Washington Post: Wilson Andrews, Darla Cameron, Emily Chow, Alberto Cuadra, Kat Downs, Laris Karklis, Todd Lindeman, Katie Park, Gene Thorp, and Karen Yourish.
