Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
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The First Rule Is You Don’t Talk About It
Read on…: The First Rule Is You Don’t Talk About ItThere 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 work on the size and…
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Comparing Surgeries
Read on…: Comparing SurgeriesWe 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 to explain the three types…
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Follow the Money
Read on…: Follow the MoneyFollow 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. Via my colleague Lauren Beth.…
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A Timeline of Deaths in Syria
Read on…: A Timeline of Deaths in SyriaThe 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. In this particular case, specific…
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21st Century Prohibition
Read on…: 21st Century ProhibitionThis 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.
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The Science of Cherry Blossoms
Read on…: The Science of Cherry BlossomsThe 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 narration by AJ Chavar.
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Heritage Maps
Read on…: Heritage MapsFrom 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 of each county, state, or…
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Bringing 19th Century Mapping Techniques to the 21st Century
Read on…: Bringing 19th Century Mapping Techniques to the 21st CenturyCharles 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. But, Booth went street-by-street and…