Remember how last week I wrote about gerrymandering in Pennsylvania? It was as the State Supreme Court was about to hear a case involving the partisan redistricting in 2011, widely perceived as one of the most egregious examples of gerrymandering in the nation. Well yesterday afternoon the State Supreme Court ruled that yes, Virginia, Pennsylvania was egregiously gerrymandered and the court ordered the state government to redraw the maps ahead of the 2018 midterms.
One of the worst offenders is the state’s 7th district. And if we go back a few years in time, the Washington Post had a nice piece that showed the (d)evolution of said district into the weird abstract art it is today.
The changing shape of Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District
Credit for the piece goes to the Washington Post graphics department.
During my travels in Europe, I enjoyed very little sunshine. It did not rain often, but the skies were overcast in both Scandinavia and London. Turns out that at least in January, after my trip, Europe was covered in an inordinate amount of sunshine. The Guardian covered the story, with a graphic showing just how little sunshine has been seen in northern Europe.
Cloudy north of the Mediterranean
Credit for the piece goes to the Guardian graphics department.
Here in Pennsylvania this week, the state Supreme Court will hear arguments on the legality of congressional districts drawn by Republicans in 2010. The state is rather evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, e.g. Donald Trump won by less than one percentage point or less than 45,000 votes. But 13 of its 18 congressional districts are represented by Republicans, roughly 72%.
This graphic is from the New York Times Upshot and it opens a piece that explores gerrymandering in Pennsylvania. The graphic presents the map today as well as a nonpartisan map and an “extreme” gerrymander. The thing most noticeable to me was that even with the nonpartisan geography, the Democrats are still below what they might expect for a near 50-50 split. Why? One need only look at Philadelphia and Pittsburgh where, using the Times’ language, the Democrats “waste” votes with enormous margins, leaving the suburban and rural parts of the state open for Republican gains.
Three different ways of drawing Pennsylvania’s congressional districts
Credit for the piece goes to Quoctrung Bui and Nate Cohn.
Today’s post is a very quick reaction to the news last night about President Trump calling Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries “shitholes” and trying to get rid of immigrants from those countries in favour of immigrants from places like Norway.
Norwegian contributions to American immigrants peaked well before the 21st century. At that time, Norway was poor and lesser developed. The data was hard to find, but on a GDP per capita level, Norway was one of the least developed countries in Western Europe. On a like dollar-for-dollar basis, El Salvador of 2008 is not too far from Norway 1850.
I wish I had more time to develop this graphic for this morning. Alas, it will have to do as is.
I’m just really hoping Africa isn’t a country again…
The Winter Olympics are creeping ever closer and so this piece from the New York Times caught my eye. It examines the impact of climate change on host cities for the Winter Olympics. Startlingly, a handful of cities from the past almost century are no longer reliable enough, i.e. cold and snow-covered, to host winter games.
This screenshot is of a bar chart that looks at temperatures, because snow and ice obviously require freezing temperatures. The reliability is colour-coded and at first I was not a fan—it seemed unnecessary to me.
At first I did not care for the colours in the bars
But then further down the piece, those same colours are used to reference reliability on a polar projection map.
But then this map changed my mind
That was a subtle, but well appreciated design choice. My initial aversion to the graphic and piece was changed by the end of it. That is always great when designers can pull that off.
Credit for the piece goes to Kendra Pierre-Louis and Nadja Popovich
January is the month of forecasts and projections for the year to come. And the Economist is no different. Late last week it published a datagraphic showcasing the GDP growth forecasts of the Economist Intelligence Unit. I used to make this exact type of datagraphic a lot. And I mean a lot. But what I really enjoy is how successfully this piece integrates the map, the bar chart, and the tables to round out the story.
Take a note at how the chart distributes the bins as well
The easy thing to do is always the map, because people like maps. They can be big, and if the data set is robust, full of data and colour. But maps hide and obscure geographically small countries. And then you have to assume that people know all the countries in the world. Problem is, most people do not.
So the bar chart does a good job of showing each country as equals, a slim vertical bar. In such a small space, labelling every country is impossible, but the designers chose a select number of countries that might be of interest and called them out across the entire series.
Lastly, people always like to know who is #winning and who is a #loser. So the tables at the extreme ends of the chart showcast the top and last five.
I may have rearranged some of the elements, and dropped the heavy black rules between the bins on the legend, but overall I consider this piece a success.
Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.
Apologies for the lack of posts over the last week or so, I have alternately been on holiday or sick while spending other time on my annual Christmas card. This will also be the last post for 2017 as I am on holiday until the new year. But before I go, I want to take a look at the election night graphics for the Alabama US Senate special election yesterday.
I am going to start with the New York Times, which was where I went first last night after returning from work. What was really nice was there graphic on their homepage. It provided a snapshot fo the results before I even got to the results page.
The homepage of the New York Times last night
The results page then had the standard map and table, but also this little dashboard element.
I’m spinning my wheels…
We all know how I feel about dashboard things. To put it tersely: not a fan. But what I did enjoy about the experience was its progression. The bars below filled in as the night progressed, and the range in the vote-ometers narrowed. But that same sort of design could be applied to other graphics representing the narrowing of likely outcomes.
The second site I visited was the Washington Post. Like the Times, their homepage also featured an interactive graphic, another choropleth map.
A different page, a different map
There are two key differences between the maps. The Times map uses four bins for each party whereas the Post simplifies the page to two: leading and won. The second difference is the placement of the map. The Post’s map is a cropping of a larger national map versus the Times that uses a sole map of the state.
For a small homepage graphic, bits of both work rather well. The Times cuts away the unnecessary map controls and neighbouring states. But the space is small and maybe not the best for an eight-binned choropleth. In the smaller space, the Post’s simplified leading/won tells the story more effectively. But on a larger space that is dedicated to the results/story, the more granular results are far more insightful.
On a quick side note, the Post’s page included some context in addition to the standard results graphics. This map of the Black Belt and how it correlates to regions of Democratic votes in 2016 provides an additional bit of background as to how the votes played out.
Note, the Black Belt was named for the black soil, not the slaves.
Credit for the piece goes to the design teams of the New York Times and the Washington Post.
This is a piece from a few years ago, but the New York Times cleverly brought it to the front of their Upshot page. And it seemed just so appropriate. Many of you are likely travelling today—I’m not, I’m headed to work—and many of you will be driving or taking the train. But some will be flying. But to and from where?
If only it captured other travel data
The map has some nice features that allow you to selectively few particular cities. Philadelphia has relatively few travellers by air, but that’s probably because places in the Northeast are more easily accessible by road or rail.
Chicago also has relatively few travellers, though more than Philadelphia. I would posit that is because most people are not flying to visit their relatives, but rather driving to places in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Indiana.
No post tomorrow, because I intend on sleeping in. But you can expect something on Friday.
Credit for the piece goes to Josh Katz and Quoctrung Bui.
I was reading the Sunday paper yesterday and whilst I normally skip the sports section, especially during baseball’s offseason, this time a brightly coloured map caught my attention. Of course then I had to read the article, but I am glad that I did.
On Sunday the New York Times ran a print piece—I mean I assume I can find it online (I did.)—about CBS chooses which American football matches to air in the country’s markets. It is a wee bit complicated. And if you can find it, you should read it. The process is fascinating.
But I want to quickly talk about the design of the thing. Remember how I said a map caught my attention. That was pretty important, because the map was not the largest part of the article. Instead that went to a nice big photo. But the information designer I am, well, my eyes went straight to the map below that.
The story dominated the section page
There is nothing too special about the map in particular. It is a choropleth where media markets are coloured by the game being aired yesterday. (The piece explains the blackout rules that changed a few years ago from what I remember growing up.)
But then on the inside, the article takes up another page, this time fully. It runs maps down the side to highlight the matches and scenarios the author discusses, reusing the same map as above, but because this is an interior page, in black and white. It probably looks even better online as they likely kept the colour. (They did. But the maps are smaller.)
To have that much space in which to design an article…
Overall, I really enjoyed the piece and the maps and visuals not only drew me into the piece, but helped contextualise the story.
Over the weekend, the American and North Korean leaders got into an argument with the North Korean leader calling President Trump old and the American leader calling Kim Jong Un short and fat. High class diplomacy.
So what holds the North Korean army, by numbers likely not quality one of the largest armed forces in the world, back from sweeping down the Korean coastlines and overrunning Seoul? Well, that would be the role of the Demilitarised Zone, or DMZ. And thankfully yesterday, whilst your humble author was out sick, the Washington Post published a piece looking at the DMZ.
The title of the piece
The piece uses a giant, illustrated in the background to provide context to the words and imagery sitting in the foreground. (That is how I justified covering it in the blog: map.) Overall the experience was smooth and informative about the sheer amount of destructive power waiting just miles north of Seoul.
Credit for the piece goes to Armand Emamdjomeh, Laris Karklis, and Tim Meko.
