Today we dive into state-level politics north of Chicago, in the state of Wisconsin. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published an in-depth article looking at the political divide in the Milwaukee metropolitan area. While one could publish an article of that nature with just lots and lots of words, the Journal Sentinel chose to use maps and charts to support their arguments.
Credit for the piece goes to Craig Gilbert and Allan James Vestal.
This past weekend was some good Red Sox baseball. Okay, so we only won two of three from Oakland, but that second game was fantastic. John Lester dominated. Last fall I mentioned a studio called Statlas that was visualising the World Series. They continue to update and tweak their product and so it was great to see Lester’s performance documented.
Though, as you can see, Lester so dominated the Athletics, you can see almost nothing happening from Oakland’s batters. But, I will skip the near ninth-inning implosion of Boston’s relief corps that nearly cost us the game. Mostly because the visualisations of the game tell a great story. And so if you like baseball and data visualisation, you should check it out.
Credit for the piece goes to Statlas.
Today I am going to take a day-long step away from data visualisation. The Harvard Business Review recently published a short piece looking at some of the symbolism—I mean symbology clearly—we use on the internets.
Credit for the piece goes to the Harvard Business Review.
Today’s post is a small interactive map—nothing fancy there—about indoor plumbing. As it turns out not every home in the United States has it. Of course, last weekend I ended up driving through those dark counties in western Pennsylvania. And I can believe it. And I can definitely say I saw a few outhouses.
Credit for the piece goes to Christopher Ingraham.
Sometimes when you are considering moving, you want to look at some broad statistics on the area in which you want to move. In Boston, the Boston Globe has put together a neat little application that does just that. Type in two settlements in the metro area and then get a quick comparison of the two.
Credit for the piece goes to Catherine Cloutier, Andrew Tran, Russell Goldenberg, Corinne Winthrop.
Today’s piece does not involve any particularly crazy graphics or forms of data visualisation. Instead, the piece is a novel way of telling a story. People are increasingly familiar with what we might call here scrolling stories. Scroll down the page and suddenly you have glossy photos or high-definition videos. The New York Times, however, has taken this idea in a different direction for a story about motorcycle helmet laws.
Instead of glossy photos, we have clear and concise charts. Instead of lots of text blocks, we have just a few sentences. The story is told by the charts and the text offers the necessary context or background. Not all stories will have the data behind them to allow the story to be told—or shown—in such dramatic fashion. But, I can hope they do.
Credit for the piece goes to Alastair Dant and Hannah Fairfield.
A little while back, the Economist posted an interesting slideshow piece that showcased the intricacies of London’s skyscraper problem and how many areas are restricted to preserve lines of sight. The user can click through each view and see just where on the map the view falls.
Credit for the piece goes to D.K., L.P., G.D., P.K. and R.L.J.
Today’s piece comes from USA Today via a colleague. The piece is part of a larger article about the increasingly all-but-certain crash of MH 370. In step-by-step fashion, it guides the user through several facets of the flight and the investigation as well as the human impact.
Credit for the piece goes to Frank Pompa, Janet Loehrke, Jeff Dionise, Anne R. Carey and Denny Gainer, Alejandro Gonzalez, and Kevin A. Kepple.
Today’s piece comes from the New York Times. It fits within a broader article about smoking in the United States. The map is a choropleth that compares the smoking rate across counties and states in 1996 and 2012. However, as the article talks about how difficult it has been to decrease the smoking rates among the poor, I wonder if even just a third map would be useful. This map could have shown the actual decline, perhaps in percentage points, of counties between 1996 and 2012. Or another related graphic could have tried to correlate income and said change.
Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.
Search authorities may have finally found the missing Malaysian Airlines flight in the southern Indian Ocean. The Washington Post created this great interactive piece to give you a sense of scale of just how difficult it has been to find the aircraft.
Credit for the piece goes to Richard Johnson and Denise Lu.
