If you remember a little while back, Amtrak No. 188 derailed in North Philadelphia at Frankford Junction. I covered it here and here. Well, the New York Times has analysed the Northeast Corridor to identify the curviest segments of track, excluding entrances and exits from stations. Perhaps as no surprise, Frankford Junction is right among the top segments.
Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.
Today’s blog post is not so much about a single piece of content, but rather a site of content. Today we look at Atlas, a new chart site from Quartz that at launch is designed to showcase chart-only content from Quartz. They state the later goal is for curated content from contributors. The charts are all made from Quartz’s in-house chartbuilder tool, an open-source platform they use to build the charts you see in a lot of their articles. And now all over Atlas.
The other nice thing about Atlas is its focus on extensibility, i.e. how you the audience can reuse the content. You can share it, you can download the data, you can link to it. You just probably shouldn’t call it your own. At launch, nothing looks too fancy. But, as a nice reminder folks, the fancier your charts get, the more likely it is that they will be harder to read and understand.
Credit for the piece or site goes to Quartz.
The story and data behind today’s graphic are worth telling. But, the execution leaves me feeling a bit empty. The piece kicks off a new series called Data Points from National Geographic. But, here in this piece we are looking for clear communication of data. So what do we get? Circles. Circles within circles within circles. My problem?
Well you can see from the first screenshot that we are missing the gap space, i.e. the space between the container circle and the data circle. The gap makes the container look larger than it really is. Granted, area is not a great way of comparing data points, but that aside, something like a tree map would probably be more accurate and still allow for the nesting that occurs, see below.
The overall display includes nice ancillary data about top importers and exporters along with how the animals in question are used. Some animals even have trade notes that offer more context on how particular animals are used.
On the plus side, the piece’s title is great: Space Monkeys and Tiger Wine. I mean, how can you not read that? While they missed lots of the moles popping out of circles on this one, they did nail the title.
Credit for the piece goes to Katilin Yarnall and Fathom Information Design.
It has rained quite a bit in the south the last couple of days, thanks to tropical weather systems. But, as some new data from NASA shows us, the world is running out of water. That is largely because we drain large underground water systems called aquifers faster than the natural environment replenishes them. The Washington Post has a small interactive map that looks at the world’s largest aquifers and respective trend towards either being recharged or drained.
Credit for the piece goes to Todd Frankel.
I really do not know much about basketball. I did not realise that the finals had been going on. But, rest assured, they were. The Washington Post looked at whether or not LeBron James had the best finals match performances since 1985. It turns out, not so much. For those of you from the Chicago area, you may instead take solace that one of those guys from that Chicago team represents well.
Credit for the piece goes to Todd Lindeman and Richard Johnson.
Adobe has introduced new charting tools. Great.
They started with “scale by area”. Fuck you, world*. Fuck you.
*I fully understand that Adobe is only giving the market what it wants. But the market/people/the world is terrible.
Well, thanks to a reddit editor frayuk, via a nice post on Vox, we now can look at what that world would look like. It’s a bit difficult to see some of the details, but click through to the Vox piece to see just those.
Credit for the piece goes to frayuk.
If you did not hear about it the other day, the head of FIFA resigned. That is kind of a big deal because football (in the rest-of-the-world sense of the word) is kind of a big deal. But the organisation that runs it is generally seen as wholly corrupt. So this BBC piece takes a look at the revenue and spending—at least so far as we know about it.
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
Last week we looked at the New York Times piece on where you grew up’s impact on future income. This week, we look at their follow-on piece, how your hometown impacts your odds of getting married. The piece includes some nice interactive choropleth maps, but my favourite part is the scatter plot correlating politics (as determined by 2012 election votes) to marriage. My hometown (‘s county) is highlighted in the screenshot below.
Credit for the piece goes to David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy.
Monday was Memorial Day here in the States. As a millennial, that means I have spent nearly most of my life in wartime. Today’s post looks at a graphic from the Washington Post that explains how anybody born after 2001 has spent the entirety of their life in wartime. Before then, however, and the numbers get fuzzier, because of the subjective nature of when the United States has been at war. But, given the undercounting in the article—as it notes—it is safe to say that the percentages visualised are low.
Credit for the piece goes to the Washington Post graphics department.
