AT&T is attempting to merge with Time Warner in order to have more/better control of a content pipeline. But as this Wall Street Journal article points out, the concept of tie-ups between media and telecoms is not exactly new. Especially since the breakup of the old Bell Telephone company.
Credit for the piece goes to the Wall Street Journal graphics department.
How much does a gallon of milk cost? That, of course, is one of the classic election questions asked of candidates to see how in touch they are with the common man. But the same can be understood by enquiring whether or not they know how much a gallon of petrol or gasoline costs. And Bloomberg asked that very same question of the United States relative to the rest of the world. And as it turns out, here in the States, fueling our automobiles is, broadly speaking, not as painful as it would be in other countries.
The piece includes the below dot plot, where different countries are plotted on the three different metrics and the dots are colour coded by the country’s geographic region. But as is usually the case with data on geographies, the question of geographic pattern arises. And so the same three metrics presented in the dot plot are also presented on a geographic map. Those three maps are toggled on/off by buttons above the map.
A really nice touch that makes the piece applicable to an audience broader than the United States is the three controls in the upper-right of the dot plot. They allow you to control the date, but more importantly the currency and the volume. For most of the world, petrol is priced in litres in local currencies. And the piece allows the user to switch between gallons and litres and from US dollars to the koruna of the Czech Republic.
Credit for the piece goes to Tom Randall, Alex McIntyre, and Jeremy Scott Diamond.
At least politically.
According to this piece from FiveThirtyEight, maybe not as much as they used to be. From a data visualisation standpoint, what stuck out at me was this plot of correlations of how similar various states are. Basically, the closer to the number 1, the more similar, the closer to 0, the less.
I might question the value of placing the numbers within the squares—see what I did there?—because the colours could be used with a legend to indicate the range of similarity. But if this were an interactive piece, it certainly could be done to reveal the number on tap or mouseover.
Anyway, it was interesting to see that among swing states, Pennsylvania is least like Georgia but most like Minnesota. The former, certainly. The latter, who would have guessed, don’t ya know.
Credit for the piece goes to the FiveThirtyEight graphics department.
Another Monday, another week, another post. But this week we will try to get by without any more Brexit coverage. So what better way to cure a hangover than with more booze? So let’s start with some fancy wine.
I meant to post this piece a little while back, but yeah that unmentionable thing occurred. Now we have the time to digest as we sip and not slam our beverage of choice—the Sun’s over the yardarm somewhere I figure. FiveThirtyEight took a look at expensive wines. It compares the pricing at various vintages for France, California, and other wine-producing regions. On the balance, a very smart piece with some great graphics.
But since I had to pick just one, since this isn’t a full-on critique, I opted for this set of small multiples. It compares the price vs. vintage for a number of California red wines. (One of which I had this weekend.)
Credit for the piece goes to Oliver Roeder.
Over the weekend I found myself curious about the notion of a growing global middle class. So I dug up some data from the Pew Research Center and did some analysis. The linked piece here details that analysis.
I go into more detail than just a map. Hopefully you enjoy the piece and find the analysis informative if not useful.
Credit goes to myself on this one.
Brexit is coming, Brexit is coming. Something about red coats? I couldn’t resist. But, the prospect of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union is real, though still not likely according to the latest polling data. What drives the sentiment to get out, kick out the illegal immigrants, and restrict new immigrants from arriving—where have I heard that before—? Well, the Washington Post takes a look at a plausible economic cause.
And because I am pretty sure I have heard something similar, the article makes a case for countries beyond the British Isles.
Credit for the piece goes to Matt O’Brien.
So last week I mentioned Pennsyltucky in my blog post about Pennsylvania’s forthcoming importance in the election. And then on Friday I shared a humourous illustrated map of Pennsylvania that led into an article on Pennsyltucky. But where exactly is it?
Luckily for you, I spent a good chunk of my weekend trying to find some data on Pennsylvania and taking a look at it. You can see and read the results over on a separate page of mine.
Last week the New York Times published a great piece on the shrinking middle class and they used a series of small multiples to tell the story. They broke the story up into several sections, based on the trends in the data, e.g. in the screenshot below the designer sorted by areas where the middle class fell but upper class rose.
From the responsive design side of things, the piece works well on narrower screens too, because the design choice of small multiple tiles permits the piece to stack and rearrange tiles.
Credit for the piece goes to Quoctrung Bui.
So one of the posts I had intended to post was on 18 April, Tax Day. It was just a bar chart from FiveThirtyEight, but it accurately described yours truly.
Yep, I filed that last week.
Credit for the piece goes to Ben Casselman.
At least relatively speaking. Today’s post is a Bloomberg article comprised primarily of charts with pithy titles summarising the data story. If listicle is a word for articles consisting of the Top-10 things about [whatever], do we start embracing charticle as the word for chart-driven stories? Even if we do, we should take note that this piece was not the work of one person, but four.
The story captures my attention to and dovetails nicely into yesterday’s piece about a possible electoral path for Donald Trump to take the White House later this autumn.
Bonus points for the responsive nature of the post.
Credit for the piece goes to Andre Tartar, Mira Rojanasakul, Jeremy Diamond, and John Fraher.
