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.
For those of you who read this blog and are not from New York, Mayor Bloomberg is done later this year; he is not running for reelection. So now is the time for retrospective and plaudits for the long-serving mayor. The New York Times published a piece this weekend examining how all of Bloomberg’s changes for redevelopment have reshaped the city of New York.
Credit for the piece goes to Ford Fessenden, Tom Giratikanon, Josh Keller, Archie Tse, Tim Wallace, Derek Watkins, Jeremy White, and Karen Yourish
Major League Baseball is set to suspend Alex Rodriguez this morning—if the news reports are true. That will all but end the season for Rodriguez, though he could well play through his appeal so you never really know. But what does this mean for the Yankees and their offense?
The New York Times put together an interactive scatter plot charting the annual salary against the number of hits (roughly a measure of offensive production throughout the year) with benchmark lines for the league average of both. First, the user can see the team averages.
At the team-level, one can see that, roughly speaking, the more money a team pays to hitters, the more productive the team. Production it should be noted, does not necessarily equal wins. Look at the Angels, who have some of the most hits, but are in fourth place (out of five) and in a difficult place to make the playoffs.
But then the user can switch to the top-10 paid hitters on each team. (Four presets are offered beneath the piece, but click on a player from any team and his compatriots will appear.) You can see how the Yankees are hitting poorly in comparison to the Red Sox. (The only reason the Yankees are not truly awful is because their pitching has not been horrible.)
So if Rodriguez is suspended for this year and next, maybe they can use his salary for next year to buy a one-year free agent that isn’t at the bottom right of the this chart.
Credit for the piece goes to Mike Bostock and Joe Ward.
After two weeks out of the country, I come back and find early this morning (thanks, jet lag) an interactive article published by the New York Times on income mobility. What does that mean? From a medium side, a long narrative interspersed with charts and graphics with which the user can interact to uncover specific data about specific elements in the dataset. From a content side, income mobility means the movement of an individual from one group of money earned to another, e.g. a poor person becoming a millionaire. The piece is fantastic and you should take the time to go read and interact with it.
For some time now I have harped on about the need to annotate and contextualise datasets. Too often, large datasets paralyse people; their eyes glaze over and they simply gaze at a graphic without seeing the data, the story, the information. Little notes and blurbs of text can help people synthesise what they see with what they read with what they know to gain better understanding. But in this piece, by combining a lengthy article—very well written although that is not the focus of this post—with powerful interactive maps and graphics, the New York Times has created a powerful piece that states and then proves the point of the article. And while doing all of that, by making the datasets explorable, the Times also allows you to find your own stories.
Lastly, in the credits section at the end you will see this piece required the input of eight individuals (though I know not in what particular capacities). Clearly, for the Times this is not about to become a regular type of infographic/datavis/journalism piece. But when will skill sets be democratised or dispersed enough that smaller teams can create similar scale projects? That will be interesting to see. However, the Times certainly leads the States if not the world in some of the best information design pieces and undoubtedly this will push other publishers of similar content in this direction.
Credit for the piece goes to Mike Bostock, Shan Carter, Amanda Cox, Matthew Ericson, Josh Keller, Alicia Parlapiano, Kevin Quealy, and Josh Williams.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-income-ladder-location-matters.html?smid=pl-share
This network diagram from the New York Times looks at a community of doctors with respect to a prescription oncology drug. Colour is used to denote types of doctors while size denotes the volume of prescriptions for any oncology drug. Admittedly, I am not keen of the bubble effect placed on the circles. Those effects and the heavy black outlines for the circles distract a bit, but not excessively so.
What really makes this graphic, as is making so many of the Times’ graphics, is the annotation and explanation of the presented data. The user can readily see how some doctors are connected, but understanding the shapes and patterns of those connections is not as clear. But then the Times furthers that by explaining how the marketers of this oncology drug would use this data.
Credit for this piece goes to the New York Times graphics team.
Pakistan has had a rough go of it of late. This map from the New York Times narrates, annotates, and illustrates just some of those problems.
Credit for the piece goes to Timothy Wallace and Sergio Peçanha.
Corporate taxes are always a fun discussion point. Who pays too much? Too little? Not at all? In May, the New York Times published an interactive piece examining US companies and their effective tax rates from 2007 through 2012.
At its core, the piece is a bubble chart along one axis that plots the tax rate for the company, with the bubble sized proportionally to said company’s market capitalisation. Colours reinforce the tax rate plotting, but are not themselves necessary. I think they would have been better tied to something along the lines of industries or profit or sales growth.
Of course that was when I saw the button for viewing the data by industry. The view of all companies is broken up into a series of charts about each particular industry. And of course, if you want information on a particular company, the smart search/filter is particularly useful.
Credit for the piece goes to Mike Bostock, Matthew Ericson, David Leonhardt, and Bill Marsh.
I am travelling abroad for two weeks. While I have a number of posts lined up, I doubt that I will be able to respond to anybody or post current and/or topical pieces. But at least you will have something. So to kick things off, this piece from the New York Times makes good use of a table. It simply marks which airlines charge fees for particular services or offerings.
Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.
Line charts can be a great way of looking at the impact of event over a metric over a set period of time. But what happens when you want to look at multiple metrics over that same period of time?
In this example from the New York Times, we have a series of line charts examining the impact of Federal Reserve actions over several years. Instead of attempting to conflate and confuse the issue by combining multiple charts into one, the designers chose to construct a vertical-running story that is linked by running narration. The final piece looks at four metrics: Federal Reserve assets, the S&P 500 index, the unemployment rate, and the labour force participation rate.
The use of the coloured bars in particular works to create and enforce the vertical narrative. The colour consistency across the four charts also aids in that effort. While an option like four small charts could have worked in one visual screen space, you would likely lose much of the detail and fidelity in the lines.
Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.
Earlier this year the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommended changes in the current blood alcohol limits to reduce youth drunk driving. The NTSB wants the limit dropped/increased from 0.08 to 0.05. Fun side note, technically, the NTSB needs to have the states enact this on their own accord because such limits are not federal power. Instead, the federal government uses the threat of witholding federal transport money as a means of urging states to comply.
Anyway, the New York Times took a look at the data on fatal crashes and blood alcohol in two heat charts. The first looks at the ages of drivers. The youth problem is self-evident.
Toggling to time of day shows perhaps a more commonly thought pattern: drunk driving rises significantly after midnight.
In general I think the piece is very successful. In particular, the breakout or separation of the new limits shows in clear relief how important those three hundredths could be in lowering alcohol-related traffic fatalities. And as seems to be increasingly the case with at least the Times, the use of annotations makes the story told by the data far clearer.
Perhaps the only design quibble I have is the shape of the squares. The rounded corners create weird, little white gaps between cells. And especially in the darker fields, they distract me more so than small, thin borders otherwise would.
Credit for the piece goes to Alastair Dant, Hannah Fairfield, and Andrew W. Lehren.
