infographic – Page 147 – Coffee Spoons

Charting and Mapping Income Mobility

After two weeks out of the country, I come back and find early this morning (thanks, jet lag) an interactive article published by the New York Times on income mobility. What does that mean? From a medium side, a long narrative interspersed with charts and graphics with which the user can interact to uncover specific data about specific elements in the dataset. From a content side, income mobility means the movement of an individual from one group of money earned to another, e.g. a poor person becoming a millionaire. The piece is fantastic and you should take the time to go read and interact with it.

A map shows the broad context of the data to be looked at in the story

For some time now I have harped on about the need to annotate and contextualise datasets. Too often, large datasets paralyse people; their eyes glaze over and they simply gaze at a graphic without seeing the data, the story, the information. Little notes and blurbs of text can help people synthesise what they see with what they read with what they know to gain better understanding. But in this piece, by combining a lengthy article—very well written although that is not the focus of this post—with powerful interactive maps and graphics, the New York Times has created a powerful piece that states and then proves the point of the article. And while doing all of that, by making the datasets explorable, the Times also allows you to find your own stories.

A story-like piece lets you choose an area and an income to see how the article's topic plays out

Lastly, in the credits section at the end you will see this piece required the input of eight individuals (though I know not in what particular capacities). Clearly, for the Times this is not about to become a regular type of infographic/datavis/journalism piece. But when will skill sets be democratised or dispersed enough that smaller teams can create similar scale projects? That will be interesting to see. However, the Times certainly leads the States if not the world in some of the best information design pieces and undoubtedly this will push other publishers of similar content in this direction.

Ultimately people want to know who's best and who's worse and where they fall and this chart does that at the end of the piece

Credit for the piece goes to Mike Bostock, Shan Carter, Amanda Cox, Matthew Ericson, Josh Keller, Alicia Parlapiano, Kevin Quealy, and Josh Williams.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-income-ladder-location-matters.html?smid=pl-share

Chicago Covered in Ice

I should be returning to Chicago this weekend. And if I were returning 21,000 years ago, that would be I would have been returning to a massive ice sheet covering the city. Would have been way worse in Montreal, though.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Pakistan’s Troubles

Pakistan has had a rough go of it of late. This map from the New York Times narrates, annotates, and illustrates just some of those problems.

Credit for the piece goes to Timothy Wallace and Sergio Peçanha.

The Carpatho-Rusyns of Slovakia

If all is going according to plan, I should be somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains at this point, specifically in the Presov region of Slovakia. So as a reminder of just what that means, here is a (recycled) piece I created this time last year about the Carpatho-Rusyns (sometimes known as Ruthenians) living in Slovakia. Click the image to go to the full infographic.

Credit goes to me for the piece, but to the statistics office of Slovakia for the data.

Senate Facebook

Partisanship in Washington has only grown worse over time. So how better to track that than through Facebook-like network analysis diagrams?

If you look at senators who voted with other senators at least 50% of the time and at least 75% of the time, and compare those numbers to numbers over a decade ago, you can see there is a lot less bipartisanship in 2013.

Compare 2013…

to 2001.

Sad but fascinating.

Credit for the piece goes to Chris Wilson.

Secret Life of the Cat

It’s Friday. So what else could you want but cat videos?! On the internet?!

But seriously, that’s what I have for you today. But with a twist. The BBC and the Royal Veterinary College collaborated to document a day in the life of cats by attaching collars with micro-cameras and GPS trackers to several felines in one English village. Cats are selected by illustration at the top of the graphic. Their day’s walking path is traced out over the village while video clips of some of the more interesting parts of the day are available to watch.

Credit for the piece goes to Steven Atherton, Chris Finch, Alex Ranken, Lucy Rodgers, Helene Sears, Marina Shchukina, and Noah Veltman.

Hong Kong and Hongkonger Identity

Hong Kong—and to a similar extent Macau—is part of China, but at times not so much. Because of the long history of British control through their colony, the people of Hong Kong, Hongkongers, are accustomed to a more liberal, democratic, and perhaps Western lifestyle than those of mainland China. Since the British handover, a local university has been asking the inevitable question of “Are you Hongkonger or Chinese?”. This interactive piece from the South China Morning Post looks at how that answer has evolved over nearly 20 years.

The piece presents a broad overview on the right with the specific survey results displayed larger on the left. Broadly speaking, the piece is successful. In particular, the decision to highlight the particular survey on the right brings that into focus without losing the context of the historical results. And providing a timeline beneath the larger stacked bar chart on the left offers a second means of choosing a survey of interest.

Yet I think the piece lacks two, perhaps three, elements that would improve the piece. First, sometimes I like to see the numbers for data visualisations. Adding a hover or mouseover state would help with that. Second, while the chart on the left includes a 50% line, I wonder if that would not also be helpful in the historical display on the right. Thirdly, and perhaps not too important for those not terribly interested in the data, the overall piece states the sample size for all surveys being within a range. People wanting more data on the survey responses might be interested in seeing the sample size per survey.

Credit for the piece goes to Simon Scarr and Joe Lo.

Corporate Taxes

Corporate taxes are always a fun discussion point. Who pays too much? Too little? Not at all? In May, the New York Times published an interactive piece examining US companies and their effective tax rates from 2007 through 2012.

At its core, the piece is a bubble chart along one axis that plots the tax rate for the company, with the bubble sized proportionally to said company’s market capitalisation. Colours reinforce the tax rate plotting, but are not themselves necessary. I think they would have been better tied to something along the lines of industries or profit or sales growth.

Of course that was when I saw the button for viewing the data by industry. The view of all companies is broken up into a series of charts about each particular industry. And of course, if you want information on a particular company, the smart search/filter is particularly useful.

Credit for the piece goes to Mike Bostock, Matthew Ericson, David Leonhardt, and Bill Marsh.

Office Space(s)

Today’s piece comes to me from my colleague Eileen. The Harvard Business Review published a report commissioned by Steelcase that looked at how different cultures prefer different office layouts, based upon different attitudes and traits exhibited by the people of different countries. That lead to three different types of spatial layouts.

But what is really nice is that the piece prompts you to start through an example or case study to see how the data works to shape the conclusion. You can of course skip to the data exploration mode, but that is not the default mode. But when you do arrive at the exploration area, you can click through different countries and see how their surveyed opinions plot against each other.

And if you want to understand more about the different layouts presented for each group of countries, you can click on the layout to bring up more information. This panel of information provides context and explains just how the general traits shared by those geographies leads to the preferred office space layout.

Credit for the piece goes to Christine Congdon and Catherine Gall.