Category: Uncategorized

  • Rising Seas

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    Brendan Barry
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    Via the Guardian, Stamen Design has teamed up with Climate Central to create an interactive piece that maps the potential effects of rising sea levels. The user has control over the amount of the rise—this graphic says four feet—after which the coastline recedes to reveal the devastation. This is complemented by statistics of the land,…

  • Cholera

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    Brendan Barry
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    Cholera. It’s more than just a disease on the Oregon Trail. It exists in the 21st century, though typically we do not experience it in the industrialised Western world. Where one does see it crop up are in places with poor sanitation, which is usually in the developing world. But, if one were to take…

  • The First Rule Is You Don’t Talk About It

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    Brendan Barry
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    There are two things one is not supposed to discuss in mixed company, and let us face it, the internet is some rather mixed company. One of those things, politics, I frequently mention and bring up on this blog. The other, religion, I do not. Until now. (I think.) From the National Post comes this…

  • Comparing Surgeries

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    Brendan Barry
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    We have an obesity problem in the United States. And in some cases, obesity leads to diabetes. A study was commissioned to discover whether surgery is more effective than the usual prescription of drugs, diet, and exercise. It turns out that surgery may very well be more effective. The New York Times produced an infographic…

  • Follow the Money

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    Brendan Barry
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    Follow the money is almost always good advice. And in this case, the journalists over at ProPublica have done just that. They have visualised just where the campaign (and Super PAC) dollars are going using an interactive Sankey diagram. And then for those interested in how this was made, ProPublica provides those details as well.…

  • A Timeline of Deaths in Syria

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    Brendan Barry
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    The civil war in Syria rages on. The following graphic from the New York Times accompanies the article and uses a calendar-style timeline to look at the mounting death toll. The visualisation type appears more and more often for time-based data sets shaped around days; we all (usually) understand how calendars work and are shaped.…

  • 21st Century Prohibition

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    Brendan Barry
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    This map comes from the BBC, which investigates prohibition in the 21st century at the local level, as the national policy ended in the early decades of the 20th century. Credit for the map goes to John Walton, Harjit Kaura, and Nadzeya Batson.

  • The Science of Cherry Blossoms

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    Brendan Barry
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    The Washington Post explains the science—or is it art—of the cherry blossom in D.C. though an illustrated video. Certainly this is literally more illustrative in concept than some other posts here, but the illustrations nonetheless match the audio explanations and parallel nicely with the aesthetic qualities of the cherry trees. Drawings by Patterson Clark and…

  • Heritage Maps

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    Brendan Barry
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    From FlowingData comes a post to an interactive piece by Bloomberg that looks at the geographic distribution of different heritage—read heritage, neither race nor ethnicity—groups. (Its choice of groups, however, is slightly contentious as it omits several important ones, including African-Americans.) I would say that a typical map like this would simply plot the percent…

  • Bringing 19th Century Mapping Techniques to the 21st Century

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    Brendan Barry
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    Charles Booth was a 19th century social scientist living in Britain. He famously investigated poverty and mapped out which parts of London were teeming with vicious, lower-class criminals or well-to-do upper class folks. Today, one might use a simple choropleth style to paint whole swathes of London by postal districts or constituencies or some such.…