Some People Never Had Experience with…

Air is an art project by Marina Vitaglione and written about by the BBC. The project seeks to raise awareness of the air pollution in and around London. She used cyanotypes to capture the pollution in the area. She collected evidence of the pollution in circular areas on paper and then exposed them as cyanotypes.

Cyanotypes work by exposing a piece of paper coated in a substance that, when exposed to sunlight, turns blue. The parts protected from sunlight, in this case the pollution, stay their original colour and you are left with what here is air pollution.

Where is that protection that I needed?

This screenshot from the article compares the air pollution in Lewisham on the left to Wembley on the right. As the author explained in the article the “aesthetic, the cyan-blue tone of cyanotypes remind me of pure, cloudless skies, contrasting with the vision of grey clouds we have when we think of air pollution”.

If you want to read more about the process or see more examples of her artwork, I recommend reading through the BBC article. Or, for my London readers, you can see the artwork in person as part of the Koppel Project Exchange’s show What on Earth.

Credit for the piece goes to Marina Vitaglione.

A Very Loud Tube

As all my readers probably know, I love London. And in loving London, I love the Tube and the Oyster Card and all that goes along with Transport for London. But, I have noticed that sometimes when I take the Underground, there are segments where it gets a bit loud, especially with the windows open. The Economist covered this in a recent article where they looked at some data from a London-based design firm that makes noise protective gear. (For purposes of bias, that seems important to mention here.)

The data looks at decibels in a few Underground lines and when the levels reach potentially harmful levels. I took a screenshot of the Bakerloo line, with which I am familiar. (At least from Paddington to Lambeth.) Not surprisingly, there are a few segments that are quite loud.

I definitely recall it being loud
I definitely recall it being loud

I like this graphic—but like I said about bias, I’m biased. The graphic does a good job of using the above the 85-decibel line area fill to show the regions where it gets loud. And in general it works. However, if you look at the beginning of the Bakerloo line noise levels the jumps up in down in noise levels, because they happen so quickly in succession, begin to appear as a solid fill. It masks the importance of those periods where the noise levels are, in fact, potentially dangerous.

I have had to deal with this problem often in my work at the Fed, where some data over decades is available on a weekly basis. One trick that works, besides averaging the data, is thinning out the stroke of the line so the overlaps do not appear so thick. It could make it difficult to read, but it avoids the density issues at the beginning of that chart.

All in all, though, I would love a London-like transport system here in Philly. I’d rather some loud noises than polluting cars on the road.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.

Treasury of Atreus

Oh, hello. Apologies for the break from posting, however, after the Thanksgiving holidays I fell ill. Consequently I spent the entirety of December either sick or on holiday. Neither of which is conducive to posting. But I have largely recovered and so we begin a new year with a new post.

This piece comes from my visit to the fantastic British Museum. It describes the Treasury of Atreus. It was neither a treasury nor of Atreus. Instead it served as a tomb for an unknown man, but someone of great importance. The signage displays the structure of the tholos, or tomb, and how it was oriented.

The sign explaining the Treasury and the fragments to the right along with the massive columns .
The sign explaining the Treasury and the fragments to the right along with the massive columns .

Signs like these make exhibits far more insightful, for me at least. The design of the tholos could be explained solely through words, however a graphical representation does wonders for me and, likely, others who learn better visually.

This sign could be like any sign, however, until I read the small sentence explaining the doorway to the right of the sign represents the facade of the Treasury with the two columns part original and part reconstruction. When you realise that and then see it, the true scale of the Treasury becomes known.

The actual columns, or parts thereof, of the Treasury of Atreus
The actual columns, or parts thereof, of the Treasury of Atreus

Credit for the piece goes to the British Museum’s design staff.

The London Job Exodus

Brexit is bad for Britain. Here is some proof from an article by Bloomberg that looks at where London-based banking jobs are headed post-Brexit. Spoiler alert, not elsewhere in Britain. The article purports to be more of a tracker in that they will add on data about jobs moving places when news breaks. But I cannot verify that part of the piece.

What I can verify is a sankey diagram. Underused, but still one of my favourite visualisation forms. This one explores where companies’ London-based banking jobs are moving. Right now, it clearly says Frankfurt, Germany is winning.

Look at all those job…
Look at all those job…

As sankeys go, this one is pretty straightforward. Aesthetically I wonder about the colour choice. I get the blues and that the banks are coloured by their ultimate destination. But why the gradient?

But conceptually the big question would be what about London? I probably would have kept London in the destination set. While many jobs are likely to leave Britain, some will in fact stay, and those lines will need to go somewhere in this graphic.

The piece also makes nice use of some small multiple maps and tables. All in all, this is a really solid piece. It tells a great—well, not great as in good news—story and does it primarily through visuals.

Credit for the piece goes to Gavin Finch, Hayley Warren and Tim Coulter.

New York Is Still Beating London

So two weeks ago I posted about the graphics in a BBC article about how London has surpassed New York in terms of murders, due to a spate of stabbings in the British capital. Well, somehow I missed this: an article from the Economist that rebuts that point. And it does it brilliantly.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

I think everybody who works with data knows that adage. Now, I am not using it to say that the BBC—or the numerous other media outlets that ran the story—lied. Just that it is easy to change the story based on the data, how it is presented, or which subsets of the data are selected.

The Economist’s article points out that the surpassing of New York is a short term data point, a worrying short term trend, definitely, but they then look at the data. They select two timeframes and look at them side-by-side.

It's all about what data you show, choose to highlight, and then how you show it.
It’s all about what data you show, choose to highlight, and then how you show it.

And that is what I love about this piece. It shows the long-term context of New York having a far-higher medium-term history of murder (some 28 years of data is shown). When I was growing up in the 90s, murders in New York—and to be fair almost all large American cities—was just something that was a known fact. During that time, London hovered below 200 or so, compared to the 2000+ in early 90s New York.

But then they also show the short term, which does point to a steady rise in London murders. But, the data could also show a one-time dip in the murders in New York. But they also show that the total number of deaths is still higher in New York than London, despite the three months of data.

Murder is not good. But these graphics are a good example of how selecting different time series for the same data set, and then showing which parts of the data to show. The earlier BBC piece, and my revision of it, did not show the total deaths. Nor did either piece show the longer timeline of data.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.

Labour Marches On (into Tory Housing?)

We have a nice little piece from the Economist today, a look at the electoral majority for London-area constituencies and how their housing prices may begin to draw out priced-out Labour votes from London proper.

The political impact of scarce housing supply
The political impact of scarce housing supply

What I really like from the design side is the flip of the traditional choropleth density. In other words, we normally see the dark, rich colours representing high percentages. But here, those high majority constituencies are not the ones of focus, so they get the lighest of colours. Instead, the designers point attention to those slimmest of majorities and then offer the context of average home prices.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist’s Data Team.

Home Vacancies in Kensington and Chelsea

I added Chelsea to make doubly certain for my Philadelphia audience that you did not think I was referring to Philly’s Kensington. Why? Because today’s piece comes from the Guardian and refers to the neighbourhood where the Grenfell Tower caught fire and the inferno killed dozens of people.

A north–south divide
A north–south divide

This is not the most complex piece, but I really like the annotations and notes on the choropleth. They add a great amount of detail and context to a graphic that I imagine many places would be okay leave as is. I can see why the colour palette differs for the two maps, but I wonder if it could have been made to work as a unified palette.

Credit for the piece goes to the Guardian graphics department.

London in Small Multiple Form

You all know that I love small multiples. And we have been seeing them more often as representations of the United States. But today we look at a small multiple map of London. The piece comes from the Economist and looks at the declining numbers of pubs in London. With the exception of the borough of Hackney, boroughs all across London are seeing declines, though the outer boroughs have seen the largest declines.

Mini London
Mini London

The only thing that does not work for me is the bubble in each tile that represents the number of pubs. That gets lost easily among the blue backgrounds. Additionally, the number itself might suffice.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.

The Grenfell Fire

This weekend, the New York Times published an online piece explaining the spread of the Grenfell Tower fire in London. The story uses small animated graphics and videos to show the origin and progression of the fire from an exploding refrigerator on the fourth floor to its trapping of residents on the 23rd and final floor.

Where it began
Where it began

 

Credit for the piece goes to Troy Griggs, Mika Gröndahl, Josh Keller, Jamine C. Lee, Anjali Singhvi, Megan Specia, Derek Watkins, and Jeremy White.

Night Tube

Transport for London (TfL), the organisation that runs the London Underground or Tube, has announced a nighttime service called Night Tube. It is not for the entire system, but only a few specific lines. That means that TfL needed a new map. And that means that everyone will want to create their own version of the Night Tube map. So this article at City Metric looks at just that. The TfL version is shown below.

The official TfL map
The official TfL map

Credit for the original goes to Transport for London.