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.”
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.
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.
Reynold de Mohun
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.
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.
A day in the life…on Mars…
Credit for the piece goes to Jonathan Corum and Jeremy White.
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.
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.
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.
Who speaks what?
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.
Driving can be dangerous. But perhaps most so in the developing world. The Pulitzer Center created this interactive map to allow users to explore just how dangerous driving can be.
A look at road deaths in Kenya
Little windows provide details on countries the user rolls over. This data looks at deaths per 100,000 people, killer/victims, and lastly a rating of law enforcement across several different issues. The map also includes links to stories on the website as well as an information panel that related small bits of information about selected countries.
Credit for the piece goes to Tom Hundley and Dan McCarey.
Earlier this summer I looked at a graphic by Thomson Reuters that compared life expectancy changes across the world from 1990 to 2011. Last month, the Washington Post published an interactive graphic that explores life expectancy (along with obesity and physical activity) across the United States from 1985 to 2010.
Changes in female life expectancy
What I really enjoy about the piece is that each toggle for the health condition, i.e. life expectancy, obesity, physical activity, the text beneath swaps out to explain what the story is. Context is key. But then the ability to flip between the actuals and the growth for both men and women allows the user to really explore the data. And to see that growth or lack thereof is not even across the sexes.
From the design side, a minor point worth noting is the use of different colour palettes based on the mapped metric. The actual values (with the greater range) use a darker green-blue and tint that down whereas the growth values (all of three conditions) are in a different palette. Here it works, though I am more accustomed in similar pieces to seeing the swapping of palettes for changes in the mapped metric.
Beneath the big map, however, are two components also well worth the user’s attention. Perhaps deceptively simple, two sets of line charts, they add (again) context to the data. For example, while it is great to see life expectancy in the United States improving, when you compare that to the rest of the developed world, we are falling behind.
Overall a solid piece.
Credit for the piece goes to Patterson Clark, Kennedy Elliott, and Katie Park.
Sometimes maps just do not carry the visual weight of the potential impact of climate change, specifically rising tides. Swathes of blue over city maps from high altitude are intellectual exercises. Who works where? Where do I live? But when you can begin to see familiar buildings and sites swallowed up by a modest rise in the sea level, the hope is that people feel the impact.
A flooded Boston
My guess is that was the intention of the Boston Globe in this piece, which lets you explore a bit of an underwater Boston waterfront.
