Tag: information design

  • A Nice Cup of Tea

    Given the absence of a post yesterday, I took some time to do a small catch-up piece for you all. Those who know me offline are well aware that I document many things about my life including when I happen to drink tea. (And that’s often.) Finding myself with some unexpected time, I looked through…

  • The First Rule Is You Don’t Talk About It

    There are two things one is not supposed to discuss in mixed company, and let us face it, the internet is some rather mixed company. One of those things, politics, I frequently mention and bring up on this blog. The other, religion, I do not. Until now. (I think.) From the National Post comes this…

  • Comparing Surgeries

    We have an obesity problem in the United States. And in some cases, obesity leads to diabetes. A study was commissioned to discover whether surgery is more effective than the usual prescription of drugs, diet, and exercise. It turns out that surgery may very well be more effective. The New York Times produced an infographic…

  • Follow the Money

    Follow the money is almost always good advice. And in this case, the journalists over at ProPublica have done just that. They have visualised just where the campaign (and Super PAC) dollars are going using an interactive Sankey diagram. And then for those interested in how this was made, ProPublica provides those details as well.…

  • A Timeline of Deaths in Syria

    The civil war in Syria rages on. The following graphic from the New York Times accompanies the article and uses a calendar-style timeline to look at the mounting death toll. The visualisation type appears more and more often for time-based data sets shaped around days; we all (usually) understand how calendars work and are shaped.…

  • 21st Century Prohibition

    This map comes from the BBC, which investigates prohibition in the 21st century at the local level, as the national policy ended in the early decades of the 20th century. Credit for the map goes to John Walton, Harjit Kaura, and Nadzeya Batson.

  • Heritage Maps

    From FlowingData comes a post to an interactive piece by Bloomberg that looks at the geographic distribution of different heritage—read heritage, neither race nor ethnicity—groups. (Its choice of groups, however, is slightly contentious as it omits several important ones, including African-Americans.) I would say that a typical map like this would simply plot the percent…

  • Bringing 19th Century Mapping Techniques to the 21st Century

    Charles Booth was a 19th century social scientist living in Britain. He famously investigated poverty and mapped out which parts of London were teeming with vicious, lower-class criminals or well-to-do upper class folks. Today, one might use a simple choropleth style to paint whole swathes of London by postal districts or constituencies or some such.…

  • Happy St. Patrick’s Day

    A day early given the weekend…so yeah, I’m (mostly) Irish-American. So this post is for the (extended) family.

  • What’s Your Drug of Choice?

    Over at the Guardian, people are playing with data about drug use. The data comes from the Global Drug Survey, and Ian Taylor and the Guardian worked together to create this interactive piece that lets you either browse drug use comparisons between Americans and Brits or compare two specific drugs between our two peoples. It…