data visualisation – Page 2

248 Years Later, Philadelphia’s Still Hosting Debates

For those of you living under a rock, 2024 is a presidential election year in the United States and the campaign for the November election truly kicks off post-Labour Day. And post-Labour Day here we are.

Tonight features a presidential debate between the two candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. Harris looks to be the first sitting vice president to win election since 1988 and Trump the first non-consecutive, two-term president since Grover Cleveland, who lost his election in 1888 only to return to office four years later.

Philadelphia has long played an outsized role in the constitutional construction of the nation given the city’s primacy in the 18th and early 19th centuries. But despite the city’s hosting of the debate, its first opportunity in nearly 50 years, the Commonwealth, a critical swing state in the electoral college, will be won in the suburbs and the smaller cities.

Enter this article about the growing role of Harrisburg’s suburbs. Harrisburg sits on the left bank of the Susquehanna River, one of the world’s oldest rivers, and is the Commonwealth’s capital, despite hearing innumerable times when I lived in Chicago that the capital was either Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. After all, someone has to referee between the East Coast in Philadelphia, (arguably) the Midwest in Pittsburgh, and the Commonwealth’s middle. A middle described at times as Pennsyltucky or sometimes as Trumpsylvania, but forever best known by James Carville’s quote, “between Paoli and Penn Hills, Pennsylvania is Alabama without the Blacks” or simplified to Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in the middle.

Harrisburg, located within Dauphin County, is one of the few growing regions of the Commonwealth. And as I pointed out in my 2020 piece about Trumpsylvania, Dauphin County is one of the few counties in south-central Pennsylvania bucking the trend of the Trumpification of Pennsyltucky, the T that sits across the top of the Commonwealth. I have not updated my analysis since the 2020 election, but just venture west of Paoli, as Carville suggested, and you will see the reddest of red counties. But not in Dauphin.

The Inquirer’s article examines the shifting electoral demographics in detail, focusing more on Cumberland County, which sits across the Susquehanna from Harrisburg in a far redder county. Granted, as my analysis showed from 2000 to 2016, Cumberland moved significantly Democratic, but in 2024 I think it best considered a stretch target.

In this choropleth map we can see the change in results at the precinct level. Anecdotally from stories I hear in Philadelphia, this makes sense given the growth in the suburbs around Harrisburg. And given Pennsylvania’s rural population continues to shrink and its urban and suburban populations continue to grow, the long-term success of Democrats will likely be tied to getting places like Dauphin to deepen in their blue and Cumberland to become a bit more purply of a red.

Credit for the Inquirer piece goes to Aseem Shukla.

Electric Throat Share

For the last few weeks I have been working on my portfolio site as I update things. (Note to self, do not wait another 15 years before embarking upon such an update.)

At the University of the Arts (requiescat in pace), I took an information design class wherein I spent a semester learning about the electricity generation market in the Philadelphia region. This became a key part of my portfolio when I applied for 99 jobs at the beginning of the Great Recession, had 3 interviews, and only 1 job offer.

That job offer lead me to Chicago and Euromonitor International where one of the first projects I worked on was a datagraphic about throat share, i.e. what drinks products/brands people in different countries drank. Essentially, I took what I learned about visualising the share of electricity generation in Pennsylvania to the share of drinks consumption across the world. Thus a career was born. Fast forward 15 years and I wanted to see how that electricity generation had changed. And I can do that because I used a public source in the US Energy Information Administration.

Anecdotally, Pennsylvanians know fracking for natural gas has been a boon to the former coal and steel parts of the Commonwealth, which really is a lifeline. But overall, Pennsylvania has long been known as a nuclear power state. More on that from a personal standpoint in a later post. Back in the uphill both ways to university day, I did not look at the United States overall. But now I can.

Largely this fits with the narratives I know. Coal has plummeted both in the Commonwealth and more broadly as natural gas has largely taken its place. No, that’s not great from a climate change perspective, but natural gas is definitely better than coal.

Renewables, nationally speaking, are now about 20% or 1/5th our net electricity generation. But in Pennsylvania, whilst this Monday morning might be a bright and blue sky day great for solar power, the nights are getting longer and we get a lot of clouds. We do have some hydroelectric dams—it helps to be a partially mountainous state. And, yes, we do have the wind farms along the Allegheny Ridge, one of the windiest spots along the East Coast, but for context one of the two nuclear reactors near to which I grew up is equal to almost the entire wind power electricity generation in the entire Commonwealth.

But for all the supposed growth in renewables, we just are not seeing it in Pennsylvania, at least not at a scale to supplant fossil fuels. And unfortunately, it is not as if demand is falling. And that might be why we are seeing quiet talks about reactivating some of Pennsylvania’s shuttered nuclear reactors. If you could bump that nuclear share of electric throat back up to 40% or even 50%, you could cut down that natural gas usage significantly.

Credit for the piece is mine.

Electing An Expert in Nameology

Congratulations on making it to Friday. Though it was a short week for my American audience.

Now that the State’s Labour Day holiday has passed, the 2024 electoral season can begin in earnest. And to begin the insanity we have a helpful graphic from xkcd.

Clearly I’m not cut out for high office with a name of seven letters.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

I Didn’t Predict a Riot

Yesterday I wrote about a BBC graphics locator map that was perhaps not as helpful as possible. Well today I want to talk about another BBC map, though not in as critical a fashion.

I landed upon this map whilst reading a series of updates about last month’s anti-immigrant riots throughout the United Kingdom—principally England.

The graphic uses small multiples of a cropping of the United Kingdom, excluding most of Northern Ireland and a good bit of Scotland. Red dots highlight where, on a particular date, far-right riots erupted. As the reader moves further into time, the red dots become a dark grey.

In general, I think this graphic works really well. The designer does not label every city and town as it’s not necessary so long as you hit the big and most notable ones. Nonetheless I have two peccadilloes with the graphic.

First, and the minor of the two, is the grey dots could perhaps be toned down a wee bit. Or fade as tints as they recede into the past.

Secondly, the note at the bottom of the graphic indicates “[t]here were no recorded incidents of unrest on Thursday 1 August”. Correspondingly, the graphic lacks a map for 1 August. If I had designed the graphic, I would have included a blank map for that date, because its emptiness could tell part of the story as sometimes nothing is something.

A blank map on Thursday could show that a brief flare up after the incident in Southport had, at best, burned out or, at worst, cooled to a simmer. Something then happened likely Friday night—after a day with only two reported incidents—or Saturday morning, which prompted a weekend of riots and destruction across the United Kingdom.

What could that be? Social media. Surprise, surprise. The BBC had a good article about the potential inflammatory aspect of social media posts on the reignition of the hatred the weekend of 3–4 August. Imagine a blank map for 1 August and a caption that notes a series of posts on, say, 2 or 3 August, followed by the red dots all across northern England.

As I said at the outset, however, I like the piece overall. Just a few small tweaks and the piece really could have hit home on just how bad things were in parts of the United Kingdom at the end of July and early August.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

Crossing a State Off the List

Back in autumn 2023 I shared a map with which I keep track of where I’ve visited (and driven/ridden through). In the months since I’ve visited a few new places and decided to update the map.

Most importantly, last autumn I visited Keane, New Hampshire for a day and so crossed the state off the list—not that visiting all 50 states has been or is today a goal of mine. Additionally, I came upon a photograph of me as a young lad in Wilmington, North Carolina. Can I recall being there? No. But I definitely was. So I added that county to the map.

Finally, in terms of new counties visited, I travelled out to Erie, Pennsylvania this past spring to witness the solar eclipse. I had never been to the far opposite corner of the Commonwealth and so coloured that eponymous county purple.

Of course on the day of the eclipse, the sky opened up and rain fell throughout breakfast. Consequently I got into my car and drove west like any proper young man until I found blue skies overhead and Ohio underneath. The eclipse was fantastic and those long-term readers should know that I have a card waiting to go to press, but am waiting for the funding of employment before going into production.

Finally, on my return from Erie, I purchased tickets to enjoy some Red Sox minor league baseball in Reading, Pennsylvania. I opted to enjoy a scenic drive instead of taking the interstates with which I am very familiar. And with that I coloured a number of western Pennsylvania counties in light purple.

Credit for the piece is mine.

The .500 Red Sox

I initially made this datagraphic over the weekend, after watching the last few weeks of Boston Red Sox baseball wherein they continued to win a game, lose a game, resulting in an even .500 record.

When I started, the graphic I sketched looked very different as I had included timelines and highlighted key moments where key players went down for the year or the year-to-date. But after I added some context of the sport’s leading clubs’ games above or below .500, I realised most of those clubs were all those that my good friends and family followed.

Consequently I ditched my initial concept and opted to instead show how middling my Red Sox have been to the rest of them. And whilst this graphic may have a few more spaghetti lines than I’d typically prefer, it does show that squiggle of consistency in the middle that is the Red Sox 2024 season to date.

Of course, when I posted it, the Red Sox had just lost to the Yankees and I said I expected them to win one and lose one the rest of the weekend to stay at .500. So what happened? The Red Sox won both and are now two games over .500.

Baseball superstition thus requires I post more graphics about the .500 Red Sox to get them more games over .500.

Credit for the piece is mine.

The Sun’s Over the Yardarm Somewhere

It’s been a little while since my last post, and more on that will follow at a later date, but this weekend I glanced through the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board’s annual report. For those unfamiliar with the Commonwealth’s…peculiar…alcohol laws, residents must purchase (with some exceptions) their wine and spirits at government-owned and -operated shops.

It’s as awful as it sounds. Compare that to my eight years in Chicago, where I could pick up a bottle of wine at a cheese shop at the end of the block for a quiet night in or a bottle of fine Scotch a few blocks from the office on Whisky Friday for that evening’s festivities. Here all your wine and spirits come from the state store.

And whilst it’s awful from a consumer/consumption standpoint, it makes for some interesting data, because we can largely use that one source to get a sense of the market for wine and spirits in the Commonwealth. That is to say, you don’t need to (really) worry about collecting data from hundreds of other large vendors. Consequently, at the end of the fiscal year you can get a glimpse into the wine and spirit landscape in Pennsylvania.

So what do we see this year?

A choropleth map of per 21+ capita sales of wine and spirits in Pennsylvania.

To start I chose to revisit a choropleth map I made in 2020, just before the pandemic kicked off in the United States. Broadly speaking, not much has changed. You can find the highest per 21+ year old capita value sales—henceforth I’ll simply refer to this as per capita—outside Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and up in the northeast corner of the Commonwealth.

The great thing about per capita sales are that, by definition, it accounts for population. So this isn’t just that because Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are the largest two metropolitan areas they have the largest value sales—though they do in the aggregate as well. In fact, if we look at the northeast of the Commonwealth in places like Wayne County we see the second highest per capita sales, just under the top-ranked in Montgomery County.

Wayne County’s population, at least of the legal drinking age, is flat comparing 2018 to 2022: 0.0% or just six people. However, sales over that same period are up 20.2% per person. That’s the 15th greatest increase out of 67 counties. What happened?

A little thing called Covid-19. During the pandemic, significant numbers of higher-income people from New York and Philadelphia bought second properties in Wayne County and, surely, they brought some of that income and are now spending it on wine and high-priced spirits.

Wayne County stands out starkly on the map, but it does not look like a total outlier. Indeed, if you look at the highest growth rates for per capita sales from 2018 to 2022, you will find them all in the more rural parts of the Commonwealth. Furthermore, almost every county that has seen greater than 15% growth is in a county whose drinking-age population has shrunk in the last five years.

Overall, however, the map looks broadly similar to how it did at the beginning of 2020. The top and centre of the Commonwealth have relatively low per capita sales, and this is Appalachia or Pennsyltucky as some call it. Broadly speaking, these are more rural counties and counties of lower income.

I spend a little bit of time out in Appalachia each year and have family roots out in the mountains. And my experience casts one shadow on the data. Personally, I prefer my cocktails, whiskies, and gins. But when I go out for a drink or two out west, I often settle for a pint or two. That part of the Commonwealth strikes me as more fond of beer than wine or spirits. And this dataset does not include beer. I have to wonder how the data would look if we included beer sales—though lower price-point session beers would still probably keep the per capita value sales on the lower end given the broad demographics of the region.

Finally, one last note on that second call out, Potter County having the lowest per capita sales at just under $42 per person. The number struck me as odd. The next lowest county, Fulton, sits nearly $30 more per person. Did I copy and paste the data incorrectly? Was there a glitch in the machine? Is the underlying data incorrect? I can’t say for certain about the third possibility, but I did some digging to try and hit the bottom of this curiosity.

First, you need to understand that Potter County is, by population, the 5th smallest with just over 16,000 total people living there. And as far as I can tell, it had just three stores at the beginning of 2022. But then, before the beginning of the new fiscal year, one of the three stores closed when an adjoining building collapsed. It was never rebuilt. And so perhaps 1/3 of the local population was forced to head out-of-county for wine and spirits. Compared to 2018, per capita sales in Potter County declined by 62%, and most of that is within the last year as the annual report lists the year-on-year decline as just under 54%.

In coming days and weeks I’ll be looking at the data a bit more to see what else it tells us. Stay tuned.

Credit for the piece is mine.

Cavalcante Captured

Well, I’ve had to update this since I first wrote, but had not yet published, this article. Because this morning police captured Danelo Cavalcante, the murderer on the lam after escaping from Chester County Prison, with details to follow later today.

This story fascinates me because it understandably made headlines in Philadelphia, from which the prison is only perhaps 30–40 miles, but the national and even international coverage astonished me. Maybe not the initial article, but the days-long coverage certainly seemed excessive when we had much larger problems or notable events occurring throughout the world.

That brings me to this quick comparison of these two maps. The first is from the local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer. It is a screenshot in two parts, the first the actual map and the second the accompanying timeline.

Then we have the BBC and their map of the story:

Both maps use light greys and neutral colours to ground the reader’s experience, his or her welcome to the world of southeastern Pennsylvania. The Inquirer uses a beige and a white focus for Chester County and the BBC omits county distinctions and uses white for rural and grey for built-up areas around Philadelphia.

Both maps use red numbers in their timeline sections to sequence the events, though the Inquirer’s is more extensive in its details and links the red events to red map markers.

The Inquirer leans heavily on local roads and highways with lines of varying width in white with thin outlines. Whereas the BBC marks only significant roads as thin blue lines.

The Inquirer’s map adds a lot of geographical context, especially for an audience fastidiously following the situation. And the following makes sense given all the local closures and anxiety—though I’m of the opinion a significant bit of those closures and anxiety were unwarranted. But for a reader in London, Toronto, or Melbourne, does anyone really need to see Boot Road? Strasburg Road? Even Route 30? Or the Route 30 Bypass (at Route 100, hi, Mum)? Not really, and so the omission of many of the local roads makes sense.

I would keep the roads relevant to the story of the search or the capture, for example Routes 23 and 1, and places relevant, for example Longwood Gardens and South Coventry. Here the BBC perhaps goes too far in omitting any place labels aside from Philadelphia, which is itself borderline out of place.

What I like about the BBC’s map, however, is the use of the white vs. grey to denote rural vs. built-up areas, a contextual element the Inquirer lacks. Over the last two weeks I have heard from city folks here in Philadelphia, why can’t the cops capture Cavalcante in Chester County? Well, if you’ve ever driven around the area where he initially roamed, it’s an area replete with wooded hills and creeks and lots of not-so-dense rich people homes. We don’t yet know where he was finally captured, but in Phoenixville he was spotted on camera because it’s an actual borough (I’m pretty certain it’s incorporated) with a walkable downtown. It’s dense with people. And not surprisingly the number of spottings increased as he moved into a denser area.

The Inquirer’s map, however, doesn’t really capture that. It’s just some lines moving around a map with some labels. The BBC’s map, though imperfect because the giant red box obscures a lot of the initial search area, at least shows us how Cavalcante evaded capture in a white thus rural, less-dense area before being seen in a grey thus built-up dense area.

All-in-all, both are good enough. But I wish somebody had managed to combine both into one. Less road map than the Inquirer’s, but more context and grounding than the BBC.

Credit for the Inquirer piece goes to John Duchneskie.

Credit for the BBC piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

It’s Been a Little While, But I Haven’t Gone Very Far

I last posted to Coffeespoons a year ago. Well, I’m back. Sort of.

Over the last year, there has been a lot going on in my family and personal life. Suffice it to say that all’s now relatively well. But the last 12 months forced me to prioritise some things over other things, and a daily(ish) blog about information design and data visualisation did not quite make the cut. And over all that time I also picked up a few new interests and hobbies, the most significant being photography.

Nevertheless I still enjoy information design. So I’m back. Though I doubt I will be posting every workday. After all, that’s when I have to go through my photographs and the other things I work upon nowadays. But, I don’t want to completely neglect this blog.

To ease back into the process, I updated a county map of the United States I last updated at the end of 2019, before the pandemic struck.

Where I’ve been in dark purple and counties through which I’ve driven or taken the train in light purple.

But I can’t really say I’ve travelled that far away from Philadelphia over the last year. The only work trip was to Chicago and for holidays I’ve travelled north to the Berkshires and New England several times. I’ve also added Providence and crossed off Rhode Island from the states I’ve visited. Finally, I’ve spent some time working remote from hotel rooms allowing me to watch baseball in nearby Minor League ballparks, Salisbury, Maryland’s Arthur Perdue Stadium, among others.

What remains abundantly clear are the two major phases of my life to date. I was born and raised in the greater Delaware Valley (Philadelphia, southeastern Pennsylvania, and southern New Jersey) and lived eight years in the Midwest (Chicago). And what connects all the journeys I’ve made from those home bases, if you will, is the tenuous county-wide tether stretching along I-80 across Indiana and Ohio into I-76 in Pennsylvania.

Unfortunately I still haven’t made it beyond the United States yet post-pandemic—hopefully that will begin changing in 2024—and so I have no updates for that map.

I cannot quite say when the next post will be. I don’t think it will be 12 months. But will it be monthly? Weekly? I can’t quite say. I doubt I will return to daily posting, because as those who know me well know, that was an enormous amount of time I spent every week preparing, writing, and posting content. But I also know well that a regular update frequency is critical to a blog, so that’s a thing I will be thinking about as 2023 begins to fade into autumn and winter.

Stay tuned.

Credit for the piece is mine.

No Matter What You Say, I’m Still Me

As many long-time readers know, I was long ago bitten by the genealogy bug and that included me taking several DNA tests. The real value remains in the genetic matches, less so the ethnicity estimates. But the estimates are fun, I’ll give you that. Every so often the companies update their analysis of the DNA and you will see your ethnicity results change. I wrote about this last year. Well yesterday I received an e-mail that this year’s updates were released.

So you get another graphic.

The clearest change is that the Scottish bit has disappeared. How do you go from nearly 20% Scottish to 0%? Because population groups in the British isles have mixed for centuries. When the Scottish colonised northern Ireland, they brought Scottish DNA with them. And as I am fairly certain that I have Irish ancestors from present-day Northern Ireland, it would make sense that my DNA could read as Scottish. But clearly with the latest analysis, Ancestry is able to better point to that bit as Irish instead of Scottish. And this shouldn’t surprise you or me, because those purple bars represent their confidence bands. I might have been 20% Scottish, but I also could have been reasonably 0% Scottish.

Contrast that to the Carpatho-Rusyn, identified here as Eastern European and Russian. That hovers around 20%, which makes sense because my maternal grandfather was 100% Carpatho-Rusyn—his mother was born in the old country, present-day Slovakia. We inherit 50% of our DNA from each of our parents, but because they also inherit 50%, we don’t necessarily inherit exactly 25% from our grandparents and 12.5% from our great-grandparents, &c.

But also note how the confidence band for my Carpatho-Rusyn side has narrowed considerably over the last three years. As Ancestry.com has collected more samples, they’re better able to identify that type of DNA as Carpatho-Rusyn.

Finally we have the trace results. Often these are misreads. A tiny bit of DNA may look like something else. Often these come and go each year with each update. But the Sweden and Denmark bit persisted this year with the exact same values. If I compare my matches, my paternal side almost always has some Swedish and Danish ethnicity, not so for my maternal side. And importantly, those matches have more. Remember, because of that inheritance my matches further up on my tree should have more DNA, and that holds true.

That leads me to believe this likely isn’t a misread, but rather is an indication that I probably have an ancestor who was from what today we call Sweden or Denmark. Could be. Maybe. But at 2%, assuming the DNA all came from one person, it’s probably a 4th to a 6th great-grandparent depending on how much I and my direct ancestors inherited.

Clearly there’s more work to do.