Last night we experienced a total lunar eclipse here in Chicago. Unfortunately, significant cloud cover meant that much of the event went unseen. That was unfortunate, because eclipses are fantastic. To explain it we have this piece from the BBC.
And for those were either unable to see it or did not know about it, here is one of the photos I took.
Credit for the diagram goes to the BBC graphics department.
Credit for the photo is mine.
11 candidates. 9 authors. (That would be the sub-title if my blog had sub-titles.)
I do not have cable and so watching the debate live was not an option. Instead, I rely upon post-debate coverage to understand who said what and to whom. Usually that means an article with some video clips. But this piece from the Washington Post looks at the debate by the numbers.
What is worth pointing out is not Trump’s hair, but the credit list below. That is nine people who had to contribute to one article, which relies both on reporting and data, on text and images, and none of it is interactive. That list is not all reporters, you have a mixture of reporters, designers, and illustrators working together to produce some quality content. And while the piece was planned—how could it not have been—it still went live within probably hours of the debate as its publish date was the same date as the debate. Sometimes people think that smart, clear graphics are simple and easy to produce. Well, not always.
The graphic itself has two nice features worth mentioning specifically. One, the use of HTML text in the graphic. That makes the text searchable and more importantly rendered by the browser on the page instead of relying upon image export quality. The second is that this piece relies on two colours: black and red. Tints of both allow the entirety of the story to be told. Each candidate is represented by the same red without need for ROYGBIV+.
Credit for the piece goes to Bonnie Berkowitz, Kat Downs, Samuel Granados, Richard Johnson, Ted Mellnik, Katie Park, Kevin Schaul, Shelly Tan, and Kevin Uhrmacher.
Sometimes when you are reading something, what you really need is context. Personally, I prefer visual context over textual, but not everybody is so thankfully we can do both. Last week a crane collapsed during inclement weather in Mecca and fell upon the Grand Mosque. I knoew that it was a large crane, but it was not until I saw this piece from the Washington Post that I truly understood just how large. People can write so many feet or this many feet all day long, but the visual juxtaposition of the crane against the Washington Monument is far more impactful.
Credit for the piece goes to Richard Johnson.
This past weekend, David Ortiz hit his 500th home run, a significant milestone in Major League Baseball attained only by a handful of players. This piece from the Boston Herald commemorates the feat—with too many photographs and embellishment for my liking—by putting his season totals on a timeline while putting Ortiz at the bottom of the 500+ home run club.
The following piece dates from April 2015 and was about the impact of defensive shifting on Ortiz, but it has a nice graphic on his home run output. It’s just outdated by most of this season. But, from a data viusalisation standpoint, I find it a far more useful and telling graphic.
Credit for the Boston Herald piece goes to Jon Couture.
Credit for the Boston Globe piece goes to the Boston Globe graphics department.
I’m Irish—my ancestors were from the southern part—and so I grew up Catholic and I went to Catholic schools. So I know some of my Jesus stories. There’s that one story about how at the end of some guy’s life he looks back at a beach—I have no idea what life means being on a beach—where he walked. He sees two sets of footprints and asks Jesus, “Bro, why are there two sets?”
“Dude bro, that’s me.”
“Whoa, then why are there sometimes only one set?”
“That’s when I carried you.”
My interpretation of Jesus speech notwithstanding, it’s one of those stories that is supposed to teach you that you are not alone. Probably because the thought of being a random event in the entire series of random events in the universe(s?) frightens people. Anyway, Randall Munroe over at xkcd took a look at the footprints story. Happy Friday, all. (And you too, bro. That’s right, I’m looking at you, Jesus.)
Following on from yesterday’s post about Queen Elizabeth’s timeline as she passed Queen Victoria, today we have another selection from the BBC that compares the reigns of the two queens. Unfortunately, while the screenshot below is okay, the overall graphics and illustrations strike me as a bit too simple and not terribly useful in making comparisons.
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
Today’s post relates very much to yesterday’s post. But this one is from the New York Times and uses aerial photography to showcase how the Jefferson grid system works in reality after it was implemented as shown yesterday.
Credit for the piece goes to the person behind the Instagram account @the.jefferson.grid
A few weeks back I looked at my ancestral family’s land grant in Wisconsin. Unlike land on the East Coast that was surveyed and organised by pioneers in different colonies using different sets of rules, after the formation of the United States, surveyed land was organised into townships that had subdivisions. In this blog post I found about the subject, there are several diagrams and maps that explain just how this system worked.
If you’re curious about how western land was organised, its worth a quick read.
Credit for the piece goes to Living History Farms.
Even when things are funny, I do not always laugh aloud. This xkcd post, however, made me do just that. And for that, it’s going up on the blog as today’s graphic of choice.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
On 6 August 1945, the United States dropped one of the only two nuclear weapons used in combat on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. 70 years later, the city has been rebuilt and the war is long since done and over—the atomic bombings playing no small part in changing the Japanese calculus of surrender. But, what happened on 6 August and then 9 August (when we used the second of two nuclear weapons on Nagasaki)? The Washington Post has this nice piece with illustrations and maps and diagrams to explain it all.
Credit for the piece goes to RIchard Johnson and Bonnie Berkowitz.
