The Washington Post explains the science—or is it art—of the cherry blossom in D.C. though an illustrated video. Certainly this is literally more illustrative in concept than some other posts here, but the illustrations nonetheless match the audio explanations and parallel nicely with the aesthetic qualities of the cherry trees.
Drawings by Patterson Clark and narration by AJ Chavar.
Yesterday’s post was about the administration’s 2013 budget proposal as visualised by the New York Times. This morning we have a brief comparison to the visualisation of the Washington Post.
The main visualisation shows spending by department compared against revenue, the difference between being the grey box of deficit. Of note is that this piece also contains the revenue, and not just the spending, unlike the New York Times version. You can also see that the level of granularity is different; the Post looks only at department-level data while the Times delves into specific programmes. Critically, the arrangement of the budget components in this graphic makes it easier to attempt comparisons of area and thus weigh Education against Defence.
If you click a particular department, you swap out the revenue side of the budget equation with the details of previous spending in that area, broken down into presidential administrations that are coloured by party. The same holds true for revenue, clicking on those reveals the amount of revenue taken in by administration. Of some note is the deficit, which shows how we did briefly have a budget surplus back in the 1990s and how that compares to the deficits of today.
All in all, while the level of detail is not present in the Post’s visualisation, I find that the comparison at the departmental level stands strongly in the favour of the Post. The Post also benefits from presenting the other side of the budget story, revenue. Unfortunately, if you care to dig any deeper into any particular part of the budget, say weapons procurement or education grants, you cannot in the Post. That leaves space for a nicely designed, detailed, clear, and informative piece should someone or some organisation be so inclined to build it.
Credit for the piece goes to Wilson Andrews, Dan Keating and Karen Yourish.
I don’t know about you, but to me, it’s beginning to look a lot like campaign season. At least from what I read on the internet. Because, according to this interactive piece by the Washington Post, there has been little local campaign spending on ads in the Chicago television market.
By clicking on the left, you are able to see the spending amounts and spending places of ads by both personal campaigns and interest groups. For national ad campaigns, there is a small outline of the continental US in the bottom left.
Above the map you have some facts about the spending and spending over time and a curious bit about whether the ads are positive or negative. Already if you move from the beginning to now, you can watch the positive ad number slip.
I do not often get the chance to post illustrative works. But, the Washington Post reported on the work of Georgetown students that shows how China has tunneled thousands of miles of, well, tunnels to create a secret labyrinth for their nuclear weapons programme. The result is that instead of the few dozen warheads that China is thought to have, they could have many more times that. They included this graphic, cropping below, with the article.
In just a few days, NASA’s next Martian rover, Curiosity, will lift off for a 2012 date with the Martian surface. The Washington Post has a two-part motion graphic piece to look at the rover’s landing and scientific components.
Credit for the piece goes to Alberto Cuadra, Sohail Al-Jamea, and Andrew Pergram.
Penn State is going through some rough times. The charges against Jerry Sandusky are most serious and the failure to do more than the legal requirement in reporting him has cost the university president his job and head coach Joe Paterno his job. Anyone familiar with the school or Paterno’s prior standing in the state—as I am as both a former student at Penn State and nearly life-long resident of Pennsylvania—is shocked/gutted/upset about what has happened.
The Washington Post, in an attempt to make sense of the charges against Sandusky, created this graphic explaining the timeline of the allegations and actions taken by principle players.
Credit for the piece goes to Bonnie Berkowitz and Laura Stanton of the Washington Post.
If you live in a big city, you’ve probably been running late, missed the bus or the train, needed to get home safely at least once. So you’ve probably taken a cab.
This interactive graphic from the Washington Post compares cab fares across a number of major cities in the United States. The cheapest cab rides are to be found in Washington D.C. The priciest are in Honolulu.
Credit for the piece goes to Todd Lindeman and Sisi Wei.
On Halloween, we will welcome the 7 billionth person into this world. That’s a lot of people. And that means a lot of food, water, shelter, comforts, &c. Stress on limited resources could become a defining characteristic of the future.
The Washington Post has an interactive piece with a few graphics out there about the growth of population. This screenshot is from the first tab about consumption. When you press play and watch the highlighted countries move through time and space, you see that the United States has not seen drastic population growth (x-axis) but has, on a per capita level, witnessed a strong growth in consumption (y-axis). Conversely, India and China have seen little growth in personal consumption but have dwarfed all others in population growth. There are very few who countries that have moved greatly in both consumption and population. And that’s probably a good thing.
If you check out the Future tab, you will also see that in less than twenty years we will all be having another slice of cake for the 8 billionth person in the world…
Credit for the work goes to Patterson Clark, Dan Keating, Grace Koerber and Bill Webster of the Washington Post.
The Washington Post has released an in-depth article, or series of articles, about the intelligence community of the United States and its growth since 11 September 2001. There are several visualisations of data and relationships between government agencies and companies along with a video introduction and, well, a traditional written article or two.
Overall, the piece is quite interesting to look through—although I have not yet had the time to do just that. Some of the visualisations appear a bit thin. But, that may be just because I have not yet had time to play with them enough to draw out any particular insights.
What is nice, however, is again having visualisations supporting editorial content in such a fashion.
