On 8 June, Britons will go to the polls in a general election that Prime Minister Theresa May called to increase her parliamentary majority. The United Kingdom faces a number of issues—I am looking at you housing and the NHS for starters—but Brexit is on the minds of a lot of people.
That makes sense, because if you recall the nation split 52–48 to leave the European Union last June. But, as the Financial Times explained the other day, that split is not as even as it used to be and that may have significant ramifications for the Conservative Party not to mention Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
The author explains the piece in nice detail, but this graphic including along with the article does a fantastic job showing the movements.
Who’s moved where?
As you can probably guess, I am a huge fan of the annotations. Although I would argue that the centre and lower two, by being placed over the graphic, may be a bit illegible. But the concept is fantastic. It shows you just how difficult it will be for Labour and the Lib-Dems to beat May in June.
Today we look at income in American cities and in particular the middle class disappearance. The Guardian published the graphics, but they originate with Metrocosm, LTDB at Brown, and IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System. So what are we looking at? Well, the big one is a set of small multiples of cities and their income breakdowns as percentages of city census tracts. This screenshot is static, but the original is an animated .gif.
The flattening of the curve
I have a few issues with the design of the graphic, the most important of which is the colour palette. If the goal is to focus on the decline of the middle class—and I admit that may be the point of the Guardian’s authors and not the original authors—why are the most visually striking colours at the top of the income distribution. Instead, you would want to draw attention to the middle of each chart, not the right. And if the idea was that the darker colours represent the higher income groups, well the positioning of each bar on the chart and the axis labelling does that already. After all, if anything, the story is that in a number of cities the middle class has shrunk while the lower income groups have grown. And you can barely see that with the lower income groups coloured yellow.
My other issues are more minor design things such as the city labelling. I kept reading the label as being below the bars, not above as it actually is.
And then I wonder if a different chart form would be more effective at showing the decline in the middle class. Perhaps a line chart plotting the beginning and end points for each cohort?
Then the piece gets into some three-dimensional maps that you can spin and rotate.
Just stop
Yeah. Shall I count the ways? A more conventional choropleth would have served the purpose far more effectively. The dimensionality hides lower income tracts behind higher ones. The solution? Allow the user to rotate and spin the map? No, get rid of the dimensionality. It offers little to the understanding of the underlying data. Not to mention, are the areas of shadows shadows? Or are they another bin or cohort of income?
And then you have to read the piece to get a fuller understanding of my criticism.
But don’t worry, I can quote it.
Chicago was largely successful transitioning away from manufacturing to a service-based economy. This shift is evident in the bifurcated pattern present in 2015 – a heavy concentration of wealth in the business/financial district and marked decline in the surrounding area.
Those of you who read this blog from Chicago or who have lived in Chicago will pick up on it. The rest of you not so much. The concentration of wealth is not located in the business/financial district. Those dark red skyscrapers are not actual skyscrapers, they are census tracts located not in the financial district, but the areas of River North, Old Town, Gold Coast, &c. Thinking of the issue more logically, yes incomes are up in cities that are doing well. But how many of those very wealthy live on the same block as their office? Not many. Your higher income is going to be concentrated in residential or mixed-residential neighbourhoods near, but not in the business/financial district.
The data behind this work fascinates me. I just wish the final graphics had been designed with a bit more consideration for the data and the stories therein. And a little bit of proper understanding of the cities and their geography would help the text.
Credit for the piece goes to Metrocosm, LTDB at Brown University, and IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System.
If you missed it—and these days that is entirely possible—over the weekend, North Korea tested yet another missile. It did land very far away as it fell just off the coast of North Korea near Russia.
But it did travel far enough away to be of concern. Why? Well, this print graphic from the New York Times does a great job showing what that missile test really tested.
Creeping towards the West Coast
I want to end on a geography lesson for Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Those little dots in the upper right part of the circle? Those are the Aleutian Islands. They are like that island in the Pacific known as Oahu, which is part of the state of Hawaii. The Aleutians are part of the state of Alaska, which is, you know, one of the 50 states. Just trying to help you out, sir. So if you ask why we care about defending those islands in the Pacific, well now you know.
Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.
Last week was crazy, am I right? But one thing that made complete sense was President Trump’s rationale for firing FBI Director James Comey.
And to prove just how much of a logical, straight-line reasoning there was we have this graphic from Sunday’s edition of the New York Times.
The complete graphic.
Okay, so maybe that is not quite such a straight line.
I want to excerpt the bottom half because it clearly shows the contradictions—the top half merely establishes the statements to be contradicted.
Yep. It’s all very clear.
I particularly like the use of the blue lines and bold set type to distinguish from the linear narrative of the administration. But what makes it work are the concisely written blurbs that detail just what the contradiction was.
Credit for the piece goes to Alicia Parlapiano, Stuart A. Thompson, and Wilson Andrews.
There is no graphic today. Why? Because I want to illustrate a point that a lot of the work I and others in the information design world depends upon data. After all it puts the data in data visualisation. But yesterday the director of the US Census Bureau resigned because the Trump administration would not meet the Census Bureau’s funding request for conducting the 2020 Census.
And that matters. Yeah, it will be bittersweet to know that Philadelphia has probably slipped behind Phoenix, but the Census and the Census Bureau do so much more than that. They collect and publish data on income, health, housing, trade, and more. And that broad and deep set of data is invaluable.
These days we joke a lot—and I count myself in that we—about alternative facts. But all kidding aside, facts matter because they should underpin any debate we can have about policy. Do you want to have a debate about immigration, well before one goes out and makes wild statements and suppositions, government statistical agencies can provide cold, hard facts about actual levels of immigration. Once we know the scale and scope of the real problem we can begin to design real solutions.
If we want to elevate our society’s discourse and move away from divisive conversations and accusations, we need to establish a common baseline around which we can debate. And observable, provable data points provide just that. If we remove those data points, we will continue to just talk past each other and into our own echo chambers.
Consequently our first step should be properly funding the US Census.
I miss the days when I could design a weekly content strategy. Well, at least sometimes I would design a weekly content strategy. Nowadays I find that what I want to do is often trumped by news out of Washington and the administration.
And that news is the abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey. There is a lot more to this story than I can type up this morning. (But I am sure we will get to it in the coming days and weeks.) But I saw this image in a tweet this morning and it sort of sums up my concerns.
That is not the sliver in which you want to find people
Well not likely—it was going to be tough regardless.
Today’s piece is also from the Wall Street Journal and it was posted Saturday, the day before the election. It used a Sankey diagram to explore the support that Le Pen would have needed to draw from every candidate in the first round to get over the 50% mark in the second round.
Turns out she didn’t get the maths
If anything this chart is not the story. The story is that the final count I saw put Macron not on 60%, but on just over 66%.
Turns out she couldn’t.
Credit for the piece goes to Stacy Meichtry and Jovi Juan.
Emmanuel Macron won the French presidential election yesterday. So Guess what we have a graphic or two of this week? If you guessed Mongolian puppies, you were wrong.
Thursday afternoon the Wall Street Journal—they seem to really be upping their game of late—published an article breaking down the connection between a Le Pen support in the first round and unemployment. For me, the key to the article was the following graphic, which plots those two variables by department. The departments that she won, generally speaking, suffer higher unemployment.
Unemployment and Len Pen support
Colour coding relates to the winner of the department. I am not certain that the size of the voters in the department matters as much. But the annotation of particular departments, qualified as being limited to the French mainland—see my problem back in April about when France is more than France—flows through the several graphics in the piece.
This is a piece from the Thursday running up to Sunday’s vote. Tomorrow we will look at a piece from the day before the vote that looked at another key component of Macron’s win.
Credit for the piece goes to Martin Burch and Renée Rigdon.
But at least today is Friday. Also Cinco de Mayo. And so in addition to trying to find some mezcal tomorrow—anybody know a good spot in Philly?—we can wrap this week up with something on the humourous side.
My mobile is a few years old now and I’ve been taking lots of the photos the last few years. Last weekend I reached a point where I could no longer take photos. Consequently I have been going back through all my old photos. And so this piece from xkcd seemed rather appropriate.
