Tag: information design

  • Boston Marathon

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    Brendan Barry
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    Today’s post comes from the Boston Globe and maps the locations of the bomb sites along the Boston Marathon route yesterday. Credit for the piece goes to the Globe Staff.

  • How Dragonflies Hunt

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    Brendan Barry
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    Today’s post is certainly smaller, but it’s always interesting to see how infographics and information design can help us better understand science and nature. This is a piece from the New York Times that illustrates how a dragonfly hunts its prey, fruit flies. Instead of flying straight at the fruit fly, the dragonfly plots a…

  • Cartograms

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    Brendan Barry
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    Continuing this week’s map theme, we have an example of a cartogram from the New York Times. This piece supplements an article about how some manufacturing companies are starting to look away from China as a place for their facilities. There are two maps, the first (not shown here) looks at economic output overall. The…

  • Choropleth Maps

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    Brendan Barry
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    Keeping with maps, they can be useful, but all too often people fall back upon them because it is a quick and easy way of displaying data for geographic entities. This graphic from the New York Times on ADHD is not terribly complex, but it uses a map effectively. The article discusses how ADHD rates…

  • Waste Water Disposal Wells

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    Brendan Barry
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    Today’s map comes from the Texas Tribune out of Austin, Texas. The map displays the location of disposal wells, i.e. the sites where the waste water from fracking and related drilling operations are dumped. Firstly, the map hints that the fracking industry is not spread equally across the state. But secondly, the map does this…

  • Arming a Civil War

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    Brendan Barry
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    War is good for the arms business. So a long and bloody civil war in Syria is just what arms manufacturers want. And while arming the Syrian government is fairly easy, how do you get weapons and ammunition to the Syrian rebels? The New York Times maps the flow of arms through an almost Sankey-like…

  • New Data Visualisation Forms

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Monday was an odd day, both 1 April and the start of baseball. I had a tough decision to make: Do I post a serious baseball-related piece or a humourous April Fool’s Day one instead? If you recall, I went for the serious baseball option. But that leaves me with Friday, where I try to…

  • Proposed Expansion of Massachusetts Railway Network

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    Brendan Barry
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    When we talk about new rail projects, or even highway or airport expansions, we like to include maps of new routes and destinations. In that sense this map from the New York Times is not new. However, we often forget in such visualisations that we have the opportunity to add layers of information that show…

  • All Fracked Up

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    Brendan Barry
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    Last week a new study revealed that the injection of wastewater from oil drilling and fracking may contribute to earthquakes. Put simply, the theory is that the wastewater injected into the ground lubricates fault lines. And when sufficiently lubricated, the resistance between sides of the fault vanishes and an earthquake is triggered to release the…

  • The Life Expectancy Gap Between Men and Women

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    Brendan Barry
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    Today’s post comes via my coworker Jonathan and his subscription to National Geographic. The spread below looks at the gap in life expectancy between men and women in the United States. Outliers are highlighted by drawing lines to the counties in question while the same colour scale is used on a smaller map to look…