It’s Oscar time. And not in the it’s time for grouchy, can-living commentary. It’s as in movie award time.
How are films promoted? Often through trailers and teasers. But how are those made? Well, the New York Times dissected trailers for five of the nine films up for best film. The piece looks at where the films are cut and spliced to create a 120-second-long overview without ruining the plot. And as it turns out, different types of trailers have different systems for cutting up those films.
Argo's Trailer
The piece is made even better through the annotations associated with different segments of the different films. This paired with the introductory text makes the diagram of the film trailers intelligible to the reader. And then of course you can click on the still and see the actual trailer. A solid piece, all around.
Credit for the piece goes to Shan Carter, Amanda Cox, and Mike Bostock.
The Washington Post has an interactive infographic piece out about the spread of the flu. The big draw is of course the map—people like maps and they are easy to navigate. However, this time the map actually can serve a useful purpose because a virus spreads through the contact of people and communities. And when illustrated over time, the user can see a general spread from the deep south to the Mid-Atlantic than the west before becoming a national problem.
The geographic distribution of the flu
But a really sharp component that I enjoy is the index of flu cases from the four most recent flu seasons. While half the years displayed have seen a gradual increase in the number of hospitalisations, the 2012–13 season became quite troublesome quite quickly. It has even surpassed the 2009–10 levels that were affected by the H1N1 pandemic.
An indexed look at the rampancy of influenza outbreaks
Lastly, not shown here, is an illustration of just what the flu is—a virus—and how it spreads and where anti-viral drugs work.
Credit for the piece goes to Darla Cameron, Dan Keating and Alberto Cuadra.
While the Superbowl was two weekends ago, I have been sitting on this post for a little while. Probably because I really just don’t understand the sport. But over at the Guardian, the interactive team put together an interactive infographic that looked at payroll spending for each team by position and by overall position, i.e. offence vs. defence.
Admittedly I found the position part not as interesting, probably because of my aforementioned lack of understanding of the game. But the small-multiples-based exploration of the offence vs. defence numbers was quite interesting. It allows the user to highlight their preferred team and then sort the view by offence, defence, or special teams.
The overview shows the breakdown of spending by teamSelecting a team highlights its dataSorting the data by one of the four metrics atop the table, in this case offence
Credit for the piece goes to the Guardian US interactive team and Harry J. Enten.
If you do not live on the East Coast, you may be unaware that there was some minor snowfall in New England over this past weekend. The Weather Channel went ahead and named the storm Nemo. (I’m going to lay off the suspect and fishy jokes.) I wanted to revisit the storm because of two graphics that both mapped snowfall totals.
The first is from the New York Times. As one would expect, a quality graphic with clear colour ranges to show the impact across the wider New England area, western New York and New Jersey.
The New York Times snowfall totals
But from the local radio station WNYC came an interesting map of users’ observations. Because it’s a local radio station, the difference between the two versions is that the breadth of data is not as far-reaching as the Times’ data from the National Weather Service.
The limits of WNYC user-reporting
However, this sort of user-created data allows for more nuanced, locally-specific data visualisations.
User-reported snowfall in the near New York area
Of course, this creates issues with the accuracy of the data. And in the case of this map, whether the amount given was a snapshot of the snowfall at the time the snow was falling or the final tally.
Credit for the pieces go to the New York Times, and to Steven Melendez, Louise Ma and John Keefe for the WNYC piece.
So that fishy little storm the Weather Channel called Nemo—you may have heard of it—put a little snow across New England. Last week the New York Times published an interactive infographic that looked at when and where the snow would be falling, from New Jersey to New York to Maine.
The storm at or near its worst
The times are cut into six-hour blocks and show in the upper left where the snow would be falling by rate per six-hours. To the right of the map is a series of bar charts that show the snowfall pattern in more or less of a wave. Beneath all of it are a comparison of when, over the last several decades, the largest snowstorms hit Boston and New York (and how much snow each city received). A comparison of the map before to the end of the storm, except for parts of Maine.
The forecast for after the worst had passed
Credit for the piece goes to Tom Giratikanon, Matthew Ericson, Xaquin G.V., Archie Tse, and Jeremy White.
This piece from the New York Times is really well done. With simple colours to differentiate three groups, values are charted on a scatter plot to show the distribution of results for an OECD science test in 65 countries. The results clearly show regional differences in the performance of girls in the sciences depending upon the region.
The overall picture
But to make the story clearer for those who may not take the time to really delve into the data, five simple buttons on the upper right take the user through the story by annotating the different highlighted views shown in each step.
Southern and Eastern Europe and the Middle East are Highlighted
Credit for the piece goes to Hannah Fairfield and Alan McLean.
On Friday Hillary Clinton steps down as Secretary of State to (likely) be replaced by John Kerry whose confirmation votes will (likely) be later this week. One of the big roles for the Secretary of State is to travel abroad and represent the United States. If secretaries go where the US needs to be represented, that would imply that some states are more important for foreign visits. So has there been a shift in priorities in recent years?
In this interactive piece the Washington Post looks at where James Baker, Warren Christopher, Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and Hillary Clinton visited during their tenure at Foggy Bottom. The screen shots below only show the maps—there are very useful tables for finding data on trips to specific countries—for Baker and Clinton and comparing the two. The shift from the European/Cold War mentality is quite pronounced.
James Baker's trips abroadHillary Clinton's trips abroad
Credit for the piece goes to Emily Chow and Glenn Kessler.
Yesterday the Washington Post published an article and an accompanying interactive infographic on life expectancy. But not just how long one can expect to live, but also how long one can expect to live in good health. What makes the piece particularly nice and effective are the annotations that explain some of the data points, in particular the outlier of Haitian males.
Life expectancies
Credit for the piece goes to Bonnie Berkowitz, Emily Chow, and Todd Lindeman.
Earlier this week, the Office of National Statistics in the United Kingdom released census results for England and Wales. (Northern Ireland and Scotland are reported separately.) England has more people than expected, most likely because of undercounting of immigrants, and Wales is now some three million and counting. There are fewer Christians than expected—and fewer Jedi than I expected—as the ranks of the non-religious grow. But from of course all of this comes a bevy of visualisations. These are but a few, but if anybody finds others worth nothing, please feel free to send them my way.
Straight from the source is a set of interactive mapping applications from ONS that compare 2001 data to 2011 data. As best it can, census districts are compared on a one-to-one basis, but with boundary changes that isn’t always possible. Clicking on district provides one with details about the responses for that area.
% Christian across England and Wales% Christian in North Devon
Perhaps the one thing missing from these—and it may well owe to the aforementioned boundary changes—is a map of changes to see which areas have been most impacted. Or a map of the results compared to the average to see where the average can be found and where the positive and negative extremes can be found.
An infographic from the Guardian looks at the overall dataset with quite a few maps and then circle-y things. While the large map is the white population in 2011, the remaining maps are before and after comparisons. Again, an interesting look would have been perhaps deviations from the average or of the actual change per district.
UK Census results visualised
I appreciate the impact of the main story, the increasing diversity of England and, to a lesser extent, Wales. London in particular is now minority white. However, I am less keen on the circle-y things and that data could probably have been presented in a clearer, more direct fashion. I am not a fan of red, yellow, and green traffic light colours, but I also recognise that the Guardian is working within their brand on this.
Unfortunately this interactive map of Northern Ireland’s national identity does not quite work for me. I appreciate the toggle between the different response options, however, I find the responses themselves hard to compare. The colours remain the same, but the scales for the results change. For those identifying as Northern Irish, the top value is clearly less than those identifying as either British or Irish. But I would have liked to have seen the scales for British and Irish to closer match. I also find the black background distracting and overwhelming the colours. I wonder how the result would have worked if treated with the above aesthetic.
British identity in Northern Ireland
The BBC took a stab too with a section devoted to the results. Unlike the ONS visualisation above, however, the side-by-side comparison is forced to be smaller with the included text. And when one zooms into a particular district, the map degrades into crude polygons—a particular pet peeve of mine—that would be unrecognisable to someone familiar with the intimate geographic details of their home region. (Yes, simple shapes make the files smaller for overview maps, but when seen up-close, they lose their value by making ugly maps.) Also, the colours and bins in this particular view are not as informative as in the view above.
Christianity in England and WalesChristianity in North Devon
The BBC, however, did create a small graphic for an article that showed population changes in the districts, alas the colours did not work as well as one would hope.
Population Change
That’s a lot for people to digest, but, overall I think the clearest visualisations go to the ONS. They lack the commentary that can be brought by journalism organisations, e.g. the BBC, but one needs a clear and powerful visualisation before one can start writing an analysis.
Credit for the ONS results goes to the ONS Data Visualisation Centre, for the Guardian infographic credit goes to Paul Scruton and Mark McCormick, for the Northern Ireland piece credit goes to John Burn-Murdoch, and credit for the BBC goes to the BBC.
We are warming the planet. And like ice cubes in a glass of water on a hot summer’s day, Earth’s ice caps will, over the course of centuries, begin to melt and contribute to a rise in sea level. Unfortunately, most of the world’s population lives close to shorelines or the rivers connecting continental interiors to the sea. The world for the generations of children following us may very well look much different than it does today.
The New York Times uses an interactive piece to show how sea level rises will impact coastlines and inland ports in the United States. Using a slider, the user can investigate sea level changes of the expected five feet over the next one to three centuries, or two longer-term scenarios that are not yet certain but possible. Below are a few of the 24 cities and metropolitan areas.
The impacts of a 25-foot rise in sea level
In Philadelphia, a rise of 25 feet inundates South Philly, Old City, Fishtown, Kensington, Port Richmond and the other neighbourhoods close to the Delaware. The Jersey Shore still exists. It has just moved dozens of miles inland. The Cape May Peninsula is well submerged.
Credit for the piece goes to Baden Copeland, Josh Keller, and Bill Marsh.
