Those that have followed me for a long time know that I am a big fan of nuclear power. It does have some drawbacks, namely its radioactive waste, but otherwise creates enormous amounts of stable, carbon-free electricity. So when I saw this article from Bloomberg about the impact of climate change on US nuclear powered electricity generating station. It makes use of a number of nice maps to show that, yeah, not good things.
Pennsylvania is a big state for nuclear power
I normally am not a huge fan of scaling circle size to the data point, but here it makes sense since the circles are tied to the geographical location. Like I mentioned with the one Notre Dame graphic, I’m not sure the advantage of the black background, but it could be that there is a benefit to the contrast over the white background.
There are additional maps in the piece that look at a few specific locations in a moderate hurricane and the expected storm surge. Again, not good. These also use light colours on a dark background.
Credit for the piece goes to Christopher Flavelle and Jeremy C.F. Lin.
Last week, the Department of Justice released the Mueller Report. It was—and still is—sort of a big deal. But this week I want to take a look at a few different approaches to covering the report in the media. We will start with a piece from Vox on the redactions in the report. After all, we only know what we know. And we know there is about 7% of the report we do not know. And we do not know what we do not know.
7% is still a fair amount of black when it’s concentrated in one section.
The above graphic looks at overall redactions as images of each page show how much was withheld from the public. Then we have a small donut chart to show that 7.25% was redacted. Did it need to be a donut? No. A simple factette could have worked in its place. It could be worse, though, it could be a similarly sized pie chart.
The rest of the article moves on to a more detailed analysis of the redactions, by section, type, &c. And this screenshot is one of the more interesting ones.
Different coloured sharpies
Fundamentally we have stacked bars here, with each section’s redactions per page broken down by type. And that is, on the one hand, useful. Of course, I would love to see this data separated out. That is, show me just “investigative technique” and filter out the rest. Imagine if instead of this one chart we had four slightly smaller ones limited to each type of redaction. Or, if we kept this big one and made four smaller ones showing the redaction types.
Overall the article does a really nice job of showing us just what we don’t know. Unfortunately, we ultimately just don’t know what we don’t know.
Credit for the piece goes to Alvin Chang and Javier Zarracina.
Did something important happen yesterday in the news? We’ll get to it. But for now, it’s Friday. You’ve made it to the weekend. So sit back and binge. On gin or Game of Thrones, whatever.
Last Sunday the hit HBO show Game of Thrones returned for its final series. I did not have time to post about this piece then, but thankfully, not much has changed.
It details all the on-screen deaths in the show. (Spoiler: a lot.) It includes the series in which they died, the manner of their death, who killed them, and some other notable information. Remarkably, it is not limited to the big characters, e.g. Ned Stark. (If that is a spoiler to you, sorry, not sorry.) The piece captures the deaths of secondary and tertiary characters along with background extras. The research into this piece is impressive.
Don’t worry, if you haven’t seen the show, this spoils only some extras and I guess the locations the show has, well, shown.
Don’t go beyond the Wall
Thankfully, by my not so rigourous counting, last week added only four to the totals on the page (to be updated midway and after the finale).
In terms of data visualisation, it’s pretty straightforward. Each major and minor character has an illustration to accompany them—impressive in its own right. And then extras, e.g. soldiers, are counted as an illustration and circles to represent multiples.
For me, the impressive part is the research. There is something like over 60 hours of footage. And you have to stop whenever there is a battle or a a feast gone awry and count all the deaths, their manners, identify the characters, &c.
This was not what I was going to write about today, but the news of the fire that ravaged Notre Dame yesterday rightly dominated the news yesterday and this morning. However, while I found multiple articles dealing with photographic evidence of the damage, I did not see many that detailed the fire from an illustrative or diagrammatic standpoint.
Thankfully, the New York Times did just that. They posted an article that deals specifically with the fire. It includes this set of small multiples that shows the progression along the roof and spire.
Unfortunately wood burns quickly
The article also includes a nice diagram explaining how the fire was focused on the cathedral’s attic. That explains some of the imagery from this morning that shows combustible materials like the pews and pulpit on the stone floor fully intact. And that provides hope the overall building can be saved, as French officials are indicating today.
Credit for the piece goes to Larry Buchanan, Weiyi Cai, James Glanz, Evan Grothjan, Allison Mccann, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali, Jugal K. Patel, Scott Reinhard, Bedel Saget, Anjali Singhvi, and Jeremy White.
One of the important stories of last week that was not black hole related was that of the re-election of the Likud Party in Israel, a party headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. This will be his fourth consecutive time as prime minister plus a fifth back in the late 1990s. Of course, he is facing an expected arrest and charges on corruption, so how long he might remain in office is yet to be determined.
However, the Economist put together this great piece using a Sankey diagram showing the ebbs and flows of the various political parties in Israel since its founding.
It’s definitely not a two-party system…
Obviously, this is only a partial screenshot, but it does a great job showing those changes. Most impressive is the designers’ ability to show the continuity of the evolving parties and the name changes and the splits and recombinations.
Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.
Last week the New York Times published an article about carbon taxes, looking at their adoption around the world and their effectiveness. It is a fascinating article about how different countries have chosen to implement the broad policy idea and the various forms it can take. And, most importantly, how some of those policies can end up blunting the intended effect of carbon emission reduction.
This, however, is about the print piece, because as I was flipping through the morning paper, I found the Business section had a world map above the fold. And we all know how I feel about big, splashy print graphics.
We could use some more green on this map
Here we have a pretty straight-forward piece. It uses a map to indicate which countries have adopted or are scheduled to adopt a carbon tax programme. The always interesting bit is how the federal system in the United States is represented. Whilst a carbon cap-and-trade deal failed in the US Senate in 2009, individual states have taken up the banner and begun to implement their own plans. Hence, the map shows the states in yellow.
There is nothing too crazy going on in the piece, but it is just a reminder that sometimes, as a designer, I love big splashy graphics to anchor an article.
The United Kingdom crashes out of the European Union on Friday. That means there is no deal to safeguard continuity of trading arrangements, healthcare, air traffic control, security and intelligence deals, &c. Oh, and it will likely wreck the economy. No big deal, Theresa. But what do UK voters think about their leading political parties in this climate? Thankfully Politico is starting to collect some survey data from areas of marginal constituencies, what Americans might call battleground districts, ahead of the eventual next election.
And it turns out the Tories aren’t doing well. Though it’s not like Labour is performing any better, because polling indicates the public sees Corbyn as an even worse leader than Theresa May. But this post is more to talk about the visualisation of the results.
Of course I naturally wonder the perception of the smaller parties like the Liberal Democrats or Change UK (the Independent Group)
The graphics above are a screenshot where blue represents the Conservatives (Tories) and red Labour. The key thing about these results is that the questions were framed around a 0–10 scale. But look at the axes. Everything looks nice and evenly spread, until you realise the maximum on the y-axis is only six. The minimum is two. It gives the wrong impression that things are spread out neatly around the midpoint, which here appears to be four. But what happens if you plot it on a full axis? Well, the awfulness of the parties becomes more readily apparent.
Neither party looks very good here…
Labour might be scoring around a five on Health, but its score is pretty miserable in these other two categories. And don’t worry, the article has more. But this quick reimagination goes to show you how important placing an axis’ minimum and maximum values can be.
Credit for the piece goes to the Politico graphics department.
For some levity given today is Friday, let us get to the really contentious matters of late. Is the percentage sign acceptable in text? According to the AP, it now is. Thankfully, xkcd was on it and took a look at the acceptability of various forms of expressing a percentage.
For my frequent readers, it will be no big surprise that I am avid supporter of public transit, especially the railways. Consequently I was delighted when I read a non-Brexit piece in the Guardian yesterday that looked at public transit systems in several cities.
But it did so by comparing earlier plans or systems to those in existence today.
That’s definitely one time I’d like to live in the past.
Each design is slightly different and reflects the source material for the various cities. But I naturally selected the Philadelphia map. One of the biggest things to notice are the lack of trams/trolleys north of Girard and the addition of the River Line.
Last month Politico published an article called the Democrats’ Dilemma. It looked at what will likely be the crux of their debate for their 2020 candidates. Go moderate or hard left? The super simple version of the argument is that do you win by persuading independents and moderate Republicans to vote Democratic? Or do you win by ginning up the fervour of your liberal base and drive out the vote?
The article contrasts those approaches by looking at two neighbouring congressional districts. The first was won by Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American woman who has been at the centre of several causes célèbres in recent months. The second was won by a moderate, wealthy white man who has not really attracted any attention whatsoever.
But I don’t want to talk about the merits of either representative nor the fascinating split the article discusses. Instead, I want to look at a little piece of the graphics used in the article. It uses some simple stacked bar charts to compare and contrast the demographics of the representatives’ districts. Notably, they are different. But it goes on to compare and contrast them to the overall United States.
But what about New Zealand?
The first thing, I probably would have angled Mr. Phillips’ head so his head is straight, but that is a minor detail. The other thing I immediately noticed is a big pet peeve of mine. For the “Entire United States”, we have a map of the United States. Or do we?
What is missing? The entire states of Alaska and Hawaii, that’s what. I can understand not including Puerto Rico or other insular territories like the U.S. Virgin Islands because they are either not states or so small they would not appear visible at such a scale. However, Alaska and Hawaii are both integral parts of the United States. They are not marginal, like former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ infamous quip about Hawaii being “some island in the Pacific”.
Perhaps at the above scale, Hawaii would be too small to appear—though I doubt it. But what about Alaska? It is the largest state. And Texas isn’t even a close second. So why is Alaska not included? Unfortunately—though fortunately for Politico, whose work I generally like—this is not a problem specific to Politico.
Even my own employer, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, gets it wrong. One of their interactive data visualisation pieces, which for the record my team had nothing to do with, also completely omits Alaska and Hawaii in their map of the United States. And it’s a far larger map with ample space.
Still no New Zealand…
Including Alaska and Hawaii should not be afterthoughts. They are not second-class states. They are full constituent parts of the union. And if it is not easy to include them because they are not contiguous nor sharing the same continent, that should not obviate designers from including them in the United States.
Credit for the piece goes to the Politico’s design department and the Philadelphia Fed’s design department.
