Tag: data visualisation

  • Bringing 19th Century Mapping Techniques to the 21st Century

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Charles 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.…

  • What’s Your Drug of Choice?

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    Brendan Barry
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    Over at the Guardian, people are playing with data about drug use. The data comes from the Global Drug Survey, and Ian Taylor and the Guardian worked together to create this interactive piece that lets you either browse drug use comparisons between Americans and Brits or compare two specific drugs between our two peoples. It…

  • Senate Polarity

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Earlier this month I posted about how the New York Times looked at the polarisation of the US Senate. Now the National Journal has another, similar visualisation attempting to explain the political gridlock that was picked up by the Atlantic. For those wondering, the National Journal ranks senators on their conservativeness–liberalness by their votes and that…

  • How Popular Is Your Home State?

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    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    Public Policy Polling had a survey in February where they polled respondents on whether they had favourable or unfavourable attitudes towards states, or if they were not sure. As a Pennsylvania transplant to Illinois, I can say that Pennsylvania came out a bit better than Illinois. But how about your state?

  • A Not So Smart Smartphone Chart

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    This piece in the Globe and Mail of Toronto looks at smartphone usage by operating system through a comparison of Canada to both the United States and Japan. While I understand the need for aesthetic distinction from having an entire page of bar charts, these ring or donut charts are a touch misleading. Because of…

  • Delivery Routes

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Sunday in the New York Times, an article on bicycle delivery had an accompanying infographic. It detailed the dinner route of the article’s main individual. The piece is an interesting use of small multiples to provide a timeline of a route, while each new delivery maintains the old paths for reference. And from a data…

  • One Size Does Not Fit All

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    Brendan Barry
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    The subject matter of this piece is out of my area of expertise, but should you be in the UK and looking at women’s fashion, apparently not all listed sizes are the same. This piece by Anna Powell-Smith takes as an input a woman’s size measurements and then best fits them to the known sizes…

  • Politics Moves Further to the Extremes

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    In case you were wondering, yes, Virginia, politics in the United States are becoming more polarised. Olympia Snowe, the moderate Republican senator from Maine, is not running for re-election. And so the Senate is left without one more centrist counterweight to an extreme. To try and show how extreme, this graphic from the New York…

  • Examining the World’s Response to the Somalia Famine

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Somalia is beset by a bevy of problems; from an Islamist insurgency that holds great swathes of the south, to the de facto independent regions of Somaliland and Puntland in the north, to the pirates operating off the coast, to the barely functional government in Mogadishu that controls only sections of the capital through the…

  • And the Award Comes From…an Old White Male. Most Likely.

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    So apparently last night actors, directors, and others associated with the production of films won little statues. (And then probably celebrated with fancy foods and wines.) Yes, last night was the Academy Awards. But who is this Academy that decides upon the best films and performances? As it turns out, the demographics of the Academy…