maps – Page 57 – Coffee Spoons

Covering the New York Mayoral Primaries

Tuesday was election day in New York (among other places) where voters went to the polls for the mayoral primary (among other positions). For those living underneath what I can only presume was a very comfortable rock, this is the whole Anthony Weiner comeback election. Anyway, a bunch of different websites, most tied to the New York area, were covering the election results. So I wanted to share just a few.

First we have the Huffington Post with the most straightforward presentation. Their table covers the main candidates and their results at a borough level and at a city-wide level.

The Huffington Post's tabular results — The Huffington Post’s tabular results

The second is from the Wall Street Journal. This uses a choropleth map with different colours assigned to a select few persons running—also the only ones with a real chance of winning. Tints of these colours in each district indicate how much of the district has voted.

The Wall Street Journal reports at the district level

From WNYC we have our third example—another choropleth where different colours represent different candidates. However, unlike the Wall Street Journal, the colours here have only one tint. And instead of showing assembly districts, WNYC provides a further level of data and looks at precinct results. It does not represent the amount of the precinct that has voted, but rather whether the candidate is winning by a plurality or by a majority. Beneath the legend a second charting element is used; this details the breakdown of the vote by districts as separated into racial majority. This is an interesting addition that hints at filtering results by related data.

WNYC looks at who's winning and how — WNYC looks at who’s winning and how

And that filtering brings us to the New York Times’ piece, which does offer filtering. It highlights districts on its maps—also precinct-level and not district aggregates—based upon the metric and the specific properties of said metric. In this case, I have chosen income. And the story of different voting patterns (at this particular point in the evening) based on income is quite clear. Look at Christine Quinn’s support.

Results from people earning more than $100k

Votes from people earning less than $100k

Credit for these:

Huffington Post: Aaron Bycoffe, Jay Boice, Andrei Scheinkman, and Shane Shifflett

Wall Street Journal: the Wall Street Journal’s graphics team

WNYC: Steven Melendez, Louise Ma, Jenny Ye, Marine Boudeau, Schuyler Duveen, Elizabeth Zagroba, and John Keefe

New York Times: New York Times’ graphics department

But Can You Do the Gerrymander?

It’s Friday. And that means you will likely be contorting on the dance floor this weekend. But if you tried to bend to conform to any of these congressional districts, you would likely break your back. Gerrymandering is an old practice that basically allows state governments to decide what area (and therefore populations) belong to which congressional district. If you carve up your opposition well enough, you can consolidate them into far fewer districts than they might otherwise win. Pennsylvania is just one such example of an unbalanced state. This interactive infographic game from Slate forces you to solve the jigsaw puzzle of congressional districts.

Credit for the piece goes to Chris Kirk.

Riding the Rails

A little while ago the Washington Post published this graphic on Metro ridership. But not just anybody’s ridership, that of the individuals who sit on the DC transit agency’s board. After all, should not those overseeing Washington’s transit agency be intimately familiar with the conditions faced by DC commuters?

How agency board members ride their transit agency…

The graphic is a really nice use of small multiples and shading and tinting to indicate which lines are travelled by specific persons. An icon of a bus denotes bus ridership. This is a very good piece.

Credit for the piece goes to Wilson Andrews, Dana Hedgpeth, Mark Berman, and Luz Lazo.

The Best and Worst States for [Insert Topic]

It’s Friday, and mercifully this is a Friday before a three-day weekend. (For all of those who, like me, have a day off coming up on Monday.) So before everyone starts travelling to places here and there and everywhere in between, you best check this series of maps. Why? Because Business Insider has polled us, well 1600 of us, to find the best and worst states for a number of metrics. My personal favourite:

“Most likely due to the fact that most Americans have never been to Philadelphia, the rest of the country believes New York also has the worst sports fans. I blame John Rocker.”

Credit for the piece goes to Walter Hickey.

Syria Crisis

I did not have quite enough time to develop this piece to what I wanted, but for now it will have to suffice. I wanted to look at the situation in Syria, but I only had time to outline who has what near Syria. Click the image for the larger version.

All in the Family (and the Friends and the Neighbours)

Recently my hobby of my family’s history has focused on my Rusyn (or Ruthenian) roots. However, this recent work out of Stanford University piques my interest in my English heritage, even though much of it is very far back in time. Using my 23 × great-grandfather Reynold de Mohun you can begin to see how it links persons within families, how those lives intersected over time, and the geographical areas where that person lived. In Reynold’s case, it was the 12th–13th centuries in Somerset, England.

But as the title kindred implies, this piece is not just about direct family connections, but also the marriages and close cultural links between certainly the elite of British society. Below is how Reynold is connected to King William I, better known as William the Conqueror.

Connecting Reynold de Mohun to William I

Family history or genealogy is a topic ripe for data visualisation and information design because it is all about connections. But I have found beyond the common family tree diagram little interesting has been created. This work is a solid start in the right direction.

Credit for the piece goes to Nicholas Jenkins, Elijah Meeks, and Scott Murray.

Mars or Bust…Wait a Minute…

We already got to Mars. At the end of a week of maps and map-related things. Here’s a map of Mars. Well, sort of. It’s more of a map of Mars as explored by Curiosity. (Remember that guy?)

It’s an interactive piece from the New York Times that charts out just where the rover has driven and photographs of the stops along the way. There’s also a nice little chart that shows just how much of the trip has consisted of driving.

Credit for the piece goes to Jonathan Corum and Jeremy White.

More Internet, More Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg wants to get more people on the internet. And why not, it’s not like his company, a small entity you may not have heard of called Facebook, has anything to do with the internet. So this map by the Washington Post looks at what proportions of the world’s countries are using the internet.

Credit for the piece goes to Darla Cameron.

Is it Getting Warmer in Here?

Yes, yes it is. This map from the Washington Post looks at global temperature change since 1901. The article it supports is about how scientists are now all but certain mankind is responsible for global warming. Personally I prefer the term climate change because global warming sounds as if everything warms and as this map shows, clearly that is not the case.

Credit for the piece goes to Patterson Clark.

Say What?

This map comes from the Washington Post and it uses the American Community Survey to explore languages spoken by Americans at home other than English.

I got stuck (in a good way) on the seemingly random counties of German speakers. After I poked around a bit, I found one where almost 50% of the county speaks German. After some quick investigation, it turns out that Holmes County, Ohio is a centre for the Amish population. The Amish, of course, will often speak German or Pennsylvania Dutch, thus accounting for the abnormally high percentage of German speakers.

Credit for the piece goes to Dan Keating and Darla Cameron.