information design – Page 91

Septa’s Train and Trolley Service

Well, everyone, today you get two posts. The first and earlier (and planned) post is about polling in Pennsylvania. Relevant to those of you following the US election. But today’s post is about what trains are running in the city of Philadelphia.

If you haven’t heard, the city’s mass transit agency, SEPTA, and its primary union for workers within the city cannot come to an agreement on a contract. So…strike. And for those of you reading this from outside the Philly area, rest assured it’s just chaos right now. To put it into a wee bit of perspective, we have this graphic—actually an interactive map—of train routes in the city. And by train, Philadelphia has your standard suburban commuter heavy rail and subway lines and light rail lines, but we also make use of a number of trolley lines.

What's running and not — What’s running and not

What the map does not show are the city’s various bus routes, all of which that run within the city are suspended. There are bus routes and rail lines outside the city, most notably the commuter rail or the blue lines in the map, operated by a different union that is not on strike.

Credit for the piece goes to the Philly.com graphics department.

The Asian Arms Race

In case you missed it, two weeks ago President Duterte of the Philippines had some interesting things to say regarding the relationship between the Philippines and the United States. “America has lost” and “separation from the U.S.” were among the two big lines he spoke to a Chinese audience. But the Philippines are an important part of President Obama’s pivot to Asia strategy as we have been spending money and time improving defence ties. Naturally issues like the the pivot underpin Trump’s claims about poor judgment when it comes to the Obama/Clinton foreign policy.

The pivot’s improving defence ties come at a time of region-wide increases in defence spending. Thankfully Bloomberg put together an article with some nice graphics earlier this year. As someone who has always had an interest in naval things if not military things, see my numerous posts on that here, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the article and digesting the graphics. The one below compares the strengths of the Chinese fleets to those American fleets permanently assigned to the Pacific Ocean region.

The Chinese Navy vs (part of) the US Navy

Of course the question becomes, beyond making our military stronger, just what would Trump do to counter or affect the arms race in the Asia Pacific region?

Credit for the piece goes to the Bloomberg graphics department.

Tracking Polls One Week Out

Well the election is next Tuesday, and last Friday and this past weekend was…interesting. So one(ish) week to go, and we are going to turn to a few posts that use data visualisation and graphics to explore topics related to the election.

Today we start with the latest tracking polls, released on Friday. The piece comes from the Washington Post and highlights the closing gap between Clinton and Trump with a sudden spike in Republican candidate support. But what I really like about the piece is the plot below. It displays the 0 axis vertically and plots time with the most recent date at the top. And then support for the various demographics can be filtered by selectable controls above the overall plot.

Saturday's polling numbers — Saturday’s polling numbers

Of course the really interesting bit is going to be how much this changes in the next seven days. And then what that means for the results when we all wake up on Wednesday morning.

Credit for the piece goes to Chris Alcantara, Kevin Uhrmacher, and Emily Guskin.

Putting Things in Perspective

Congratulations, you made it to Friday. So let’s try to put that in perspective. And by that, I mean things like mines and Death Stars. Thanks to my good friend Jonathan Fairman for sharing with me this post on Core77 that uses the power of Kevin Wisbith’s Photoshop skills to compare the sizes of things. And yes, that obviously includes mines and Death Stars. But having lived in Chicago for a number of years, you get the mine photo. Because yeah, that thing must be deep.

Credit for the original work goes to Kevin Wisbith.

Early Voting So Far

70+ million people watched the debate last week. But, 2.5 million people have already voted. Me? Well in Pennsylvania there is no early voting, so you queue up on Election Day. But that also means I will have had the full election season to brush up on candidates for president and all the other offices. But what about early voters? Well the Washington Post put together an article last week about the numbers of early voters—hence my figures in the opening—and the amount of information they might have missed.

From a design standpoint, it is a really nice article that blends together large centre-piece graphics such as the above to smaller in-line graphics to margin graphics. None are interactive; all are static. But in these cases, users do not need the freedom to interact with the charts. Instead, the designers have selected the points in time or data points more relevant to the story.

Overall the piece is solid work.

Credit for the piece goes to Kevin Uhrmacher and Lazaro Gamio.

Moving on Mosul

If you didn’t already know, the Iraqi Army and Kurdish forces are moving on Mosul, a city in northern Iraq overrun by ISIS back in 2014. The New York Times has illustrated a satellite image of the Mosul area to show how the forces are progressing in their assault on the city.

Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.

Tying Up Time Warner and AT&T

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.

Baselines Are Important

Last week the Washington Post published a fascinating article on the data visualisation work of the Donald Trump media campaign. In my last job I frequently harped on the importance of displaying the baseline and/or setting the baseline to zero. When you fail to do so you distort the data. But maybe that is the point of this, for lack of a better term, political data visualisation.

My favourite author is George Orwell of 1984 and Animal Farm fame. But Orwell also penned numerous essays, one of which has struck me as particularly relevant in this election cycle: Politics and the English Language. In concluding the essay Orwell wrote:

Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

And so political data visualisation? Well I believe it exists to serve the same purpose. The article goes into detail about how the designers behind the graphics fudged the numbers. Now did the campaign intend to mislead people with the data visualisation graphics? It is hard to say, because some of their graphics actually diminish leads that Trump has among certain demographics. Could it be the designer behind the graphics simply does not understand what he or she is doing? Perhaps. We clearly cannot know for certain.

Either way, it points to a need for more understanding of the importance and value of data visualisation in the political discourse. And then the natural follow-up of how to best design and create said visualisations to best inform the public.

But I highly recommend going to the Post and reading the entirety of the article.

Credit for the original work goes to the Trump campaign graphics department, the criticism to John Muyskens of the Washington Post.

When America Votes by Goat

Last week Twitter went a wee bit crazy when Donald Trump’s son posted an image about how the Republican nominee had gained ground. Except that it turns out the image was from FiveThirtyEight and looked only at a demographic split by gender—it was what the map would look if only men voted. Suffice it to say, yeah, the Twitterverse went a wee bit crazy. Thankfully the BBC put together this really great recap with some of the best of it.

What the map would look like if goats voted

Happy Friday, all.

Credit for the pieces goes to the various original authors and designers.

Pardon the Interruptions

Well that does it for the three presidential debates. Didn’t they seem very presidential with all those interruptions and interjections? Thankfully after the debate, FiveThirtyEight put together a quick graphic highlighting the total number of each per candidate per debate.

Credit for the piece goes to the FiveThirtyEight graphics department.