Theoretical/hypothetical maps can be a lot of fun, as well as informative. Today’s post exemplifies both. Pangea was one of those super-continents where all the Earth’s landmass was mashed together into one giant continent. It broke up a few hundred million years ago into the geography with which we are roughly familiar. But I have always been curious which places were where. But thanks to this map, I no longer have to wonder.
Credit for the piece goes to Massimo Pietrobon.
The Washington Post looked at the testing of the first atomic bomb at White Sands. Nuclear weapons are a topic on which I have done some work in the past. But this piece looks more at the historic test called Trinity.
Credit for the piece goes to Alberto Cuadra and Laris Karklis.
I’m not a coffee guy. I drink tea. At most I have one or two espresso drinks per year. But up in Boston, they have been looking this week at coffee preferences. The question is which is your coffee spot? Dunkin Donuts (from Massachusetts) or Starbucks (from Washington)? Northeast or Pacific Northwest? In a piece that reminds me of the New York Times’ Wawa vs. Sheetz graphic, the Boston Globe plotted the locations of the two national coffee chains. This interactive piece allows you to toggle between dots for Dunkin Donuts (orange, naturally) and Starbucks (green, of course).
They complemented the Massachusetts-focused piece with a longer article that looked at the national distribution.
Credit for the piece goes to Alvin Chang and Matt Carroll.
Today’s post looks at an interactive graphic from the Los Angeles Times. The subject matter is piracy and the piece has three distinct views, the second of which is displayed here.
Generally speaking, the package is put together fairly well. My biggest concern is with the first graphic. It uses circles to represent the number of attacks by locale over time. I would have either included a small table for each geographic area noted, or instead used a bar chart or line chart to show the progress over time.
Credit for the piece goes to Robert Burns, Lorena Iñiguez Elebee, and Anthony Pesce.
Today’s piece comes from Bloomberg and looks at the cost of Chicago’s gun violence epidemic. And when I write cost, I mean just that. While the lives lost are the most significant, Bloomberg’s article states that shootings cost Chicago $2.5 billion per year, or $2,500 per household. They supplemented their article with an infographic detailing and breaking down these costs by focusing on the South Shore in the city’s south side.
Credit for the piece goes to Chloe Whiteaker, John McCormick, and Tim Jones.
Earlier this month the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a report on household debt. Among the findings was the story that student debt is rising to problematic levels as it may act as a brake on economic recovery. In short, without an economy creating jobs for the young (recent university graduates) it becomes increasingly difficult for the young to pay pack the loans for the sharply rising costs of university tuition.
The report made this argument by use of interactive choropleth maps and charts. The one below looks at
But another chart that talks about the rising levels of student loan debt misses the mark. Here we see some rather flat lines. Clearly student loans are growing, but without a common baseline, the variations in the other types of debt muddle that message.
I took the liberty of using the data provided by the New York Fed and charting the lines all separately. Here you can clearly see just how in less than ten years, student loans have risen from $200 billion to $1,000 billion. This as credit card debt is falling along with other forms of debt (non-automotive).
The New York Fed did some great work, but with just one tweak to their visualisation forms, their story is made much more powerful and much more clear.
Credit for the original work goes to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Here’s an older, March graphic from the New York Times that looks at Alaska Airlines. This exemplifies what maps do well; it maps relevant data onto a map. Perhaps that reads silly, but too often people map data just because most things are tied to a geography; things that happen in the world happen somewhere, ergo everything could be mapped.
In this graphic, however, mapping the tight and Alaska-focused network with tendrils sneaking off-map to distant cities. The map supports the article that tells how after decades of focusing on Alaska, the airline has begun to expand to Midwestern cities in the US, cities in Mexico, and Hawaii.
I am not terribly keen on the stacked bar chart. It highlights the steady Alaska market over the decades at the cost of showing dynamism in those Midwestern, Mexican, and Hawaiian markets.
Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times Graphics Department.
Last year Hurricane Sandy wrecked swathes of the Jersey Shore and Long Island. Since then, authorities and officials have been busy preparing and rebuilding the shore for the unofficial start of summer: Memorial Day Weekend. This interactive map from the New York Times looks at what will be open for Memorial Day from Connecticut through Long Island to as far south as Margate.
Once you find your preferred beach, you can see the details of what will be open, closed, or otherwise different. This is the view for Atlantic City, nearest to the southern New Jersey shore towns where I spent so many years but are left off the map.
Credit for the piece goes to Jenny Anderson, Lisa W. Foderaro, Tom Giratikanon, Sarah Maslin Nir, Robert Davey, Christopher Maag, and Tim Stelloh.
This choropleth map comes from Deadspin and it looks at each state’s highest paid public employee. As you can probably imagine since the graphic comes from Deadspin, most states pay their highest wages to sports coaches. Ten states pay somebody other than a sports coach. And five of those are in the Mid-Atlantic/New England area.
Credit for the piece goes to Reuben Fischer-Baum.
On Tuesday I shared with you some work by Jonathan Corum at the New York Times on the 17-year cicadas now starting to emerge back east. (And as I recall from my childhood, I assure you that they are quite loud.) Today we look at an illustration of the cicada life cycle via the Washington Post.
As I discussed the other day about other graphics, there are differences in how the two newspapers are presenting the same topic or subject matter. The New York Times piece concerns itself with the emergence over time of cicadas across the United States and links to historical articles about those events. Here, however, the Washington Post instead explains just how you get a seventeen-year period between emergences.
Additionally, the Washington Post maps near the end are not interactive as in the New York Times piece. But what this allows the Post to do is focus on those broods that impacted the Washington area instead of all those areas likely outside the Post’s core readership.
Credit for the piece goes to Patterson Clark.
