Today we look at a piece that focuses on my native (and favourite) state: the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. (Along with Virginia, Massachusetts, and Kentucky, we self-identify as a commonwealth and not a state.) FiveThirtyEight examines how Pennsylvania and its shifting political preferences might just be the key (get it? keystone) to the election for both candidates. The crux of the article can be seen in the map, but the whole piece is worth the read. If only because it mentions Pennsyltucky by name.
Today’s post is just a little scatter plot today of my own creation. I was interested to see which countries fall outside the mainstream when it comes to economic and political freedom, as measured by the Heritage Foundation and Freedom House, respectively.
Those are certainly not the only indices that I could have chosen, however, they were admittedly the easiest to find and use. Despite the fact the one dataset still contained data on such mythical places as Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and the Soviet Union.
That all said, my apologies for the graphics not quite being super clean. I am working on some new things and so this post is at best only a partially successful experiment.
Last week FiveThirtyEight posted a nice article about the best pitchers in baseball. Turns out Pedro Martinez rates pretty highly among them. The late 90s and early 00s were great for Red Sox pitching.
Pedro was great
Credit for the piece goes to Neil Paine and Jay Boice.
It’s Friday the 13th. So after a look at Holyrood election results, today we have a look at the correlation between how well people (think they) dance and the amount of alcohol they consume.
Last week Scotland voted for its parliament, Holyrood. The Scottish National Party did well enough, the Conservatives picked up quite a few seats, and Labour lost quite a few. The Guardian put together this piece looking at the results and the stories contained therein. But I want to focus on the graphics, the big piece of which was a map of Scotland with each constituency represented by a small Sankey diagram.
Scotland’s results
You see that generally, Scotland is a sea of yellow, surging blue, and diminishing red. But what about the numbers for each constituency? The interactive nature of the chart lets you see the 2016 results mousing over the constituency.
Aberdeenshire West results
Normally I would say that a piece like this is missing an easy way for someone to find their own constituency, however, this is not a results page, but an article on the results, so something like a search bar is not necessary.
What I really enjoy, however, is that when the story breaks down the results by regions, the map becomes an abstracted series of squares used to highlight the constituencies in focus. It is a really nice reuse of the concept and the overall graphic.
Talking about Glasgow
Credit for the piece goes to the Guardian’s graphics department.
Dickens is not my favourite, but that felt an appropriate title for today’s piece from the Washington Post on Chicago residents’ opinions on, well, Chicago. Turns out there is a notable demographic split on how residents feel about various things in the city.
Okay, that joke was a stretch. But, this piece from the New York Times’ Upshot takes a look at the early polling in the increasingly likely Clinton–Trump matchup in November.
The early polling
Credit for the piece goes to Wilson Andrews, Josh Katz, and Alicia Parlapiano.
Or the post’s sub-title could be something like, Boys with Toys, because I have long enjoyed diagrams of military hardware, liketheseexamples. Today’s post is about Russia’s new main battle tank, the first new design since the 1970s: the T-14 Armata. It premiered in last year’s parade and is expected to enter service soon. This BBC article from last year’s parade shows the various new models expected to enter the Russian Army.
Russia’s new toy
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
I am not a big fan of fully justified text. I get it, in things like newspaper and narrow blocks of copy, it can make sense. Although in those situations, again, personal preference is flush left ragged right. But, for when you do have to fully justify your text, xkcd has a guide to deal with those tricky situations where you have very few characters on a line.
Not every graphic information graphic is a sexy chart or map. Sometimes tables communicate the story just as well. Maybe even better. Today’s post comes from FiveThirtyEight, which examined a claim about what places represent “Normal America”. Turns out that when one looks at the data, here age, race, ethnicity, and education, Normal America is found in the eastern half of the country. And it includes some big cities, notably both Philadelphia and Chicago. The whole article is worth a read, as it goes on exploring states representing Normal America and then places that represent 1950s America.
Where is Normal America?
So where is Normal America? New Haven, Connecticut.
