Tag: data visualisation

  • Dots Beat Bars

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    Brendan Barry
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    Today is just a quick little follow-up to my post from Monday. There I talked about how a Boston Globe piece using three-dimensional columns to show snowfall amounts in last weekend’s blizzard failed to clearly communicate the data. Then I showed a map from the National Weather Service (NWS) that showed the snowfall ranges over…

  • How Accurate Is Punxsutawney Phil?

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    Brendan Barry
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    For those unfamiliar with Groundhog Day—the event, not the film, because as it happens your author has never seen the film—since 1887 in the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania (60 miles east-northeast of Pittsburgh) a groundhog named Phil has risen from his slumber, climbed out of his burrow, and went to see if he could see…

  • America’s Crime Problem

    America’s Crime Problem

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    Brendan Barry
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    During the pandemic, media reports of the rise of crime have inundated American households. Violent crimes, we are told, are at record highs. One wonders if society is on the verge of collapse. But last night a few friends asked me to take a look at the data during the pandemic (2020–2021) and see what…

  • Obfuscating Bars

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    Brendan Barry
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    On Friday, I mentioned in brief that the East Coast was preparing for a storm. One of the cities the storm impacted was Boston and naturally the Boston Globe covered the story. One aspect the paper covered? The snowfall amounts. They did so like this: This graphic fails to communicate the breadth and literal depth…

  • How the Globe’s Writers Voted

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    Brendan Barry
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    Yesterday we looked at a piece by the Boston Globe that mapped out all of David Ortiz’s home runs. We did that because he has just been voted into baseball’s Hall of Fame. But to be voted in means there must be votes and a few weeks after the deadline, the Globe posted an article…

  • Slaveholders in the Halls of Congress

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    Brendan Barry
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    Taking a break from going through the old articles and things I’ve saved, let’s turn to a an article from the Washington Post published earlier this week. As the title indicates, the Post’s article explores slaveholders in Congress. Many of us know that the vast majority of antebellum presidents at one point or another owned…

  • Graduate Degrees

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    Brendan Barry
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    Many of us know the debt that comes along with undergraduate degrees. Some of you may still be paying yours down. But what about graduate degrees? A recent article from the Wall Street Journal examined the discrepancies between debt incurred in 2015–16 and the income earned two years later. The designers used dot plots for…

  • Philadelphia’s Wild Winters

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    Brendan Barry
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    Winter is coming? Winter is here. At least meteorologically speaking, because winter in that definition lasts from December through February. But winters in Philadelphia can be a bit scattershot in terms of their weather. Yesterday the temperature hit 19ºC before a cold front passed through and knocked the overnight low down to 2ºC. A warm…

  • The Terrible No Good Chart About Gas Prices

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    Brendan Barry
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    Saw this graphic on the Twitter the other day from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), or the D Triple C or D Trip C. The context was that earlier in the day Matt Yglesias posted a clearly tongue-in-cheek chart about how after signing the infrastructure bill, President Biden had single-handedly fixed inflation and gas…

  • Those Are Some Heavy Balls

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    Brendan Barry
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    Unfortunately, I don’t subscribe to Business Insider, but I saw this graphic on the Twitter and felt the need to share it. Primarily because baseball will almost certainly stop at midnight when the owners of the teams will impose a lockout (as opposed to players going on strike). And with that baseball will be on…