Over at the Guardian, I was using this interactive piece from igraphics to follow the election results there. (It was a slight bit more interesting than following the French presidential election, because everybody knew Sarkozy was going to lose.)
Credit for the piece goes to igraphics, a Greek data visualisation outfit.
I don’t normally do the re-posts to the other blogs I follow, but this post on Flowing Data is a link to an interesting piece of analysis on the political groups in the US Senate. It’s worth a(nother) look.
The BBC provides an interactive tool to explore the battleground states in the forthcoming election. A giant donut chart with 50 segments maps a segment to a state and its total number of electoral votes. The larger the electoral vote, e.g. California, the larger the segment. Beyond just a giant chart, however, the BBC has placed the states into different camps, the Democrats, the Republicans, and the Battleground states.
Selecting either the Democrat strongholds or the Republican strongholds highlights the states for each respective party. Not a lot of functionality is to be had. Clicking on a state merely displays its name and number of votes. But this is not the main function of the piece.
The main goal of the piece is to explore the Battleground states. When the user selects one, he or she is presented with a new view that moves the chart partially off-screen—while keeping the Battlegrounds in view—and moves a profile piece on-screen. This view contains both a text summary of the state and its challenges along with important demographic statistics.
For an American audience, there is probably little to be gained from the piece unless one is wholly unfamiliar with American politics. But for the more international part of the BBC News audience, this piece gives them quick insights into the various states that will be so important over the course of the next few months.
Via the Guardian comes an interactive piece from researchers at MIT and the Technical University of Lisbon that allows users to examine urban environments to compare population, energy use, and building material intensity for a select set of 42 different cities. The screenshots below are of neighbourhoods in Philadelphia.
Once the user has chosen an area, he or she can move on and analyse a different section of the city. This behaviour generates a comparison on the right of the current area to the previous area.
After the user has found an area of particular interest, he or she can generate a graphical report that summarises the findings for the selected area and compares that to other areas of similar scale in the city.
Credit for the piece goes to David Quinn and Daniel Wiesmann.
The US is not the only country with elections in 2012. Actually quite a few other places have had them, will have them, or are in the midst of having them. The latter includes France, which had the first round of its presidential election earlier this week.
To put it simply, France has a first round to narrow the whole field to just two candidates—lots of democracies outside the US have multiple party systems that mean more than just two parties—and then a second round between the last two. Nicholas Sarkozy was thought likely to win the first round and then lose the second, but he instead lost the first outright. He still isn’t expected to do well in two weeks’ time. But, the French media of course produce infographics just as US, Canadian, and British media do. Except unlike the last three, French infographics tend to be in French and I tend to not read them because, well, I cannot.
But pictures and colours make it easier. Socialists like red. Centre-right like blue.
From Le Figaro comes a map of the results. The island-looking thing on the right is Paris, beneath that Corsica, and then the bottom are the various overseas territories and departments that all vote.
The question with French presidential elections—and in fact any country that has run-off elections—is what happens to the voters of the losers? For whom will they vote in the second round? Le Figaro also has an interactive piece that allows the user to play out different scenarios based on how many voters will not show up and of those who do, how they split their vote. Again, it’s in French, so I had to assume some things when playing around with the controls and then know a few things about French politics.
From Le Monde, another respected French media source that I have featured on more than one occasion, come some simpler visualisations of the results but with some nice features for comparison. The first is obviously a look at the 2007 results. (Anybody recall Segolene Royal? Her ex-husband/partner is Francois Hollande…the guy running for the Socialists this time round.)
But another interesting view is that of the results strictly from 2012’s first round.
But with the added feature of comparing those results per party to their performance in 2007.
There are always interesting things going on in politics when it comes to data visualisation and infographics. We just have to look outside the US from time to time.
So Rick Santorum is now out of the race. Mitt Romney is basically now set to run against the President. But why should Santorum go out without an infographic looking back at the Republican primary race. (Since neither Newt nor Ron come even close to running the same race as Rick.)
The New York Times put out an infographic looking at Rick Santorum’s campaign. And as one can see, he did do well in the evangelical and Christian conservative heartland of the United States. It just was not quite enough to beat Romney’s supporters.
But, Santorum did manage to last longer in the race than many others have in recent years. So who knows, depending on how the election in November turns out, we may just see more of Rick in the future.
And the baseball season is kicking off (perhaps a bit slowly for my 1–3 Red Sox, but I’m not worried…yet). The Washington Post, the newspaper for those most likely to be following the Washington Nationals, put out a little while ago an interactive graphic looking at the payroll figures for the Top-3 starting pitchers in each team’s rotation.
Credit for the piece goes to Sisi Wei and Todd Lindeman.
Everybody knows that executives make a lot of money. But not all of it comes from just salary, some comes from bonuses, stocks, options, and other perks. So who makes the most?
The New York Times put together an interactive piece with data from Equilar about the 50 most-highly paid chief executives from companies over $5 billion in size. The data is arranged as stacked bars, with—when available—2010 data to compare to 2011. The order can be sorted a number of different ways and the executives on display can be filtered by what industry his or her—granted only 3/50 are women—company works in.
Credit for the piece goes to Lisa Waananen, Seth Feaster, and Alan McLean.
For those that may have missed it, earlier this week Google released its newest addition to its Google Maps product offering: the 8-bit Quest map. Never before has the world been seen in such high-resolution. And if you look close enough, you might even be able to spy some interesting features.
Happy Monster Hunting Quest.
Via the Guardian, Stamen Design has teamed up with Climate Central to create an interactive piece that maps the potential effects of rising sea levels. The user has control over the amount of the rise—this graphic says four feet—after which the coastline recedes to reveal the devastation. This is complemented by statistics of the land, including the population potentially affected along with the number of homes and total acres. In this case you see South Jersey, which is where I spent my summers. As you can see, the coastal beach towns I called home would be underwater. (And the little blue specks inland in Pennsylvania near my hometown, those are quarries; nobody lives there. No need to worry.)
The problem, of course, is that a large percent of the Earth’s population lives near the ocean. There are not, after all, many people living in the interiors of the continents. So receding coasts may very well be a problem in the coming years.
