data visualisation – Page 90

The Massachusetts Special Election

As I have been blogging the past several days, today the Supreme Court will announce its rulings on the two gay marriage cases. But, I have already looked at that twice now. Today I want to look at the results of the Massachusetts special election for the US Senate, necessitated by John Kerry resigning from the seat to become Secretary of State.

This work comes from the Huffington Post. It offers the usual map fare with towns coloured by the victor and tinted by the share of the vote. Though do note the interesting—is this novel?—means of filling in the town with colour to represent the percent of the town reporting. My screenshot is a bit late, but check out Warren near Springfield or Boston and Cambridge—a bit harder to see because of their size and shape.

Looking across the state for the results

However, the fascinating thing is the use of the small multiples of scatter plots to look at historic elections. The designers included a small key in the upper-right explaining that dots above the line represent towns where Ed Markey, the Democrat who won, outperformed the historic Democrat. I have not seen anybody attempt to portray the data in this fashion before.

Using a scatter plot to chart the results

Credit for the piece goes to Aaron Bycoffe and Jay Boice.

Tax Breaks for the Wealthy

In today’s post we look at a small interactive piece from the Washington Post. Everybody pays taxes. And everybody seeks to find ways to pay less in taxes. This interactive stacked bar chart (and bar matrix) examines how much the different available tax benefits help Americans, grouped into income quintiles. The measure is dollars, not percentage of income (either personal or national), so clearly highest income Americans are the big winners in tax benefits while low income Americans lose out. For example, most low income people do not make enough money to invest in the stock market. Therefore they cannot reap the benefit of preferential tax treatment of dividend income as opposed to wage income.

Credit for the piece goes to Darla Cameron.

Mapping Boston’s Neighbourhoods

Ever wonder what neighbourhood you really live in? In every city I have ever visited, neighbourhoods have clear cores but murky, fuzzy borders. Last year, bostongraphy.com took a stab at defining Boston’s neighbourhoods with a survey. If you read through the description and don’t just look at the pretty pictures, you will see they talk a bit about the methodology, which is quite nice. But either way, here’s a map of Boston’s neighbourhoods.

And the phrase that wins the day: “…hexagons had slightly more carto-hipster cachet.”

Credit for the piece goes to Andy Woodruff.

Plastic Surgery

This Friday we look at plastic or cosmetic surgery. Because you should always feel better about yourself before the weekend begins. The work comes from the National Post and it looks at the popularity of specific types of surgeries for men and women over the last several years.

It’s a nice use of small multiples, line charts, and bar charts to explore the issue. I take issue with only one chart near the end of the piece. It looks at minimally invasive procedures and uses bar charts to compare the numbers. However, the bars do not sit on a common baseline and but for the addition of data labels, they would be useless in comparing the numbers of procedures.

Credit for the piece goes to Mike Faille and Richard Johnson.

Black and White Maps

Rarely do I have criticism for infographics or pieces published by the New York Times, and admittedly this time I no longer have the original. However, in May, the Times published a map that was printed in black and white in their paper. I could not make heads or tails of what the map was attempting to say. I later found the online (and full-colour) version of the graphic. Because I no longer have the paper on me, I took the image and then discarded the colour information to simulate the effect.

Comparing colour to black-and-white, link to the colour version

One must always beware of the ultimate use of their designed work, be it an infographic or something else entirely. If one designs for digital, online display, he or she can rest relatively assured that colour will be available for their piece. However, in a black and white print environment, the colour here in a divergent palette fails to communicate the split between increases and decreases in aquifer levels. I would have expected a different palette or the use of patterns for the print version of this story.

Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times Graphics Department

Campaign Contributions

On 21 May, Angelenos went to the polls to elect the next mayor of Los Angeles. The contest followed an earlier vote that prompted the day’s run-off election. This graphic from the Los Angeles Times examined the contributions to the campaigns of the two finalists, Eric Garcetti and Wendy Greuel.

The overall piece features an interesting interactive component that allowed the user to switch from a scatter plot view to a stacked bar chart view and then filter those results based on whether they were direct or indirect contributions. Generally speaking, that element worked. However, I want to focus on the second big component: an interactive tree map.

While not all tree maps have to be squarified, by converting datapoints to (roughly) similar shapes the user should have an easier time comparing the area of the objects. This tree map is not squarified and so the user must strain to convert all the different shapes into roughly equal shapes for a visual comparison. Nor is there an inherent ranking within the map—at least not that I can find. That would also help.

So while the tree map is not a success in and of itself, the rollover condition makes for a more interesting overview of the different sectors of contributions. But despite this added value in the rollover, the data powering the tree map would still be better presented in a different format.

Credit for the piece goes to Maloy Moore and Anthony Pesce.

Dunkin Donuts vs. Starbucks

I’m not a coffee guy. I drink tea. At most I have one or two espresso drinks per year. But up in Boston, they have been looking this week at coffee preferences. The question is which is your coffee spot? Dunkin Donuts (from Massachusetts) or Starbucks (from Washington)? Northeast or Pacific Northwest? In a piece that reminds me of the New York Times’ Wawa vs. Sheetz graphic, the Boston Globe plotted the locations of the two national coffee chains. This interactive piece allows you to toggle between dots for Dunkin Donuts (orange, naturally) and Starbucks (green, of course).

They complemented the Massachusetts-focused piece with a longer article that looked at the national distribution.

Dunkin Donuts vs. Starbucks between New York and Philadelphia

Credit for the piece goes to Alvin Chang and Matt Carroll.

Piracy on the Seas

Today’s post looks at an interactive graphic from the Los Angeles Times. The subject matter is piracy and the piece has three distinct views, the second of which is displayed here.

Generally speaking, the package is put together fairly well. My biggest concern is with the first graphic. It uses circles to represent the number of attacks by locale over time. I would have either included a small table for each geographic area noted, or instead used a bar chart or line chart to show the progress over time.

Credit for the piece goes to Robert Burns, Lorena Iñiguez Elebee, and Anthony Pesce.

A (Time and) Space Race

First of all, I grew up a fan of Star Trek and not Star Wars. Star Trek is, after all, more science-y. Now, for today’s post, I could make references to the battlestar Galactica, the good ship Tardis, Planet Express deliveries, or avoiding the Alliance throughout the Verse. Instead I’ll just submit this interactive graphic from Slate.

It compares the times needed by various nerd-loved starships/spaceships/space vehicles to reach very distant (and real) stellar destinations. Don’t worry, there is a bar chart in the end with Voyager 1 thrown in for comparison to reality. (Though I suppose they could have just made it Voyager 6.)

Not accounting for differing technologies or laws of physics

See, a bar chart. It fits within the scope of this blog.

Credit for the piece goes to Chris Kirk, Andrew Morgan, and Natalie Matthews.

Changes in Global Life Expectancy

Today’s post is a scatter plot from Thomson Reuters looking at changes in global life expectancy since 1990. What is really nice about this piece is the main space for the data visualisation presents all of the data for all of the available countries. Beneath the main visualisation, the designer chose to use small multiples of the same chart to highlight broader regional trends.

Credit for the piece goes to, I think, Hwei Wen Foo. (Credit on the graphic is W. Foo.)