Category: My Work
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Stack It Up
Normally I am not a fan of stacked bar charts. They do not allow users to easily compare the constituent elements of the stack. In spending a number of years working with economists I became familiar with decomposition charts, which help audiences understand what things contribute positively or negatively to, say, economic growth. But the…
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Who Do I Think I Am?
So this is not really a funny post, but certainly is more light-hearted than what I have been posting about of late. This week Ancestry.com updated their analysis of my DNA and my origins. For long-time readers, you know I find fascinating how this aligns with my decade-plus of paper record research. So I figured…
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Tracking Measles in Pennsylvania
One project on which I have been working the last few weeks is an interactive data visualisation piece tracking the 2026 measles outbreak in Pennsylvania. A few years ago now I closely followed the COVID-19 pandemic, mapping it and charting it in a near daily series of datagraphics—to be clear, and this is a broad…
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Unemployment in America
On Tuesday I wrote about my new inflation tracker—I need a better, more marketable name for that. Well, as I was designing the inflation tracker, I concurrently designed an unemployment tracker to track, well, unemployment. And I figured if I shared the one, why not the share the other? Thus, my unemployment in America tracker…
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Inflation in America
Apologies for the lack of posting over the last month, but it was a very busy month. And so here I am back to share something I have been working on the last several weeks, an interactive application exploring inflation in America. Spoiler: it’s too damn high. The screenshot above links to the piece now…
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Do Not Look at the Sun—I looked at the Sun
With eclipse glasses. This week saw a solar eclipse race across the surface of the Earth, from the high Arctic past the British Isles and the Atlantic coast of France and then right through the Iberian Peninsula. But that meant here on the East Coast of North America we could observe a sliver of the…
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There’s Nambia
Happy Friday, all. We made it. Like the staffer at Foggy Bottom, we made it. (With a little help from our friends AI.) Earlier this week I wrote about the U.S. State Department’s map on American aid to Africa and how that map really stole the show. Unfortunately, the map was largely empty except for…
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But What About Nambia?
I was going to post about this Friday, but left it for today. We need to talk about this map. First, why so many colours? Each country is clearly separated from the other, and the best rationale for so many colours here would have been if the countries shared a border and you ran the…
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Global Integration. The Bad Kind.
I was hoping to post this yesterday, but as you will see momentarily, it is very much still a work-in-progress. Earlier this week, Ukraine sank an Iranian freighter in the Caspian Sea—a pugnacious though innocuous sounding sentence. Of course, Ukraine battles Russia in its eastern oblasts whilst Iran battles the United States and Israel in…