Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
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Read on…: How We Die
It’s Friday, so what better and more uplifting way is there to enter the weekend than looking at the most distinctive ways people die in the United States. The piece comes from Bloomberg. Credit for the piece goes to Danielle Burger.
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Words on the Orlando Shootings
Read on…: Words on the Orlando ShootingsYesterday I looked at the coverage of the Orlando shooting. Today I want to look at a really nice piece from the Washington Post on the political reaction to the shooting. The Post collected the reactions and official statements of Congress, over 500 representatives and senators. They performed some analysis of the words and then parsed out sentences into groups.…
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Coverage of the Orlando Shootings
Read on…: Coverage of the Orlando ShootingsLast Monday I stated that I would attempt a longer piece on the graphics explaining the shootings in Orlando. Since I do not have access to the print versions, I am examining only the digital versions here. Go grab a cup of tea, because this is certainly one of my longer pieces. One of the most common ways sites covered the story…
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Philadelphia’s Obesity Problem
Read on…: Philadelphia’s Obesity ProblemLast week Philadelphia became the first large US city to introduce a soda tax. (Berkeley introduced one a few years ago, but is 1/10 the size of Philly.) The Guardian has a really nice write-up on how the tax was sold not on health benefits, but of civic benefits to the education system. But the article made me wonder if…
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Productive Fridays
Read on…: Productive FridaysFunny story, a virus hit my workplace this week. And it basically cost us four days of work because nobody could actually access their work files. That made me remember this recent piece from xkcd, which is so very apropos at the end of this week. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
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Contextual Scatter Plots
Read on…: Contextual Scatter PlotsI know I mentioned that I would review the coverage of the Orlando shootings this week in more depth than I did on Monday. But, allow me an interruption for a nice little piece that I wanted to get to last week. If anything, it’s far less serious. My apologies for my focus of late on small graphics, but I…
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Tables of Insight
Read on…: Tables of InsightYesterday I opined about how simple tables can convey meaningful information without the aid of unnecessary chart elements. And while we will get back to that post, I did want to take a moment to share an older piece from the New York Times I recalled and that has been updated since Orlando. The piece uses a table to compare…
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Not All Charts Are Necessary
Read on…: Not All Charts Are NecessaryI will be trying to do a longer piece on the data visualisations surrounding the shootings in Orlando later this week. But for starters, a simple point through this piece from the BBC—not that they are the only culprits of this. Not all data-driven stories need visualisations. Sometimes a nicely typeset table will do the job better and faster. An…