Fair Warning - Dry January, paths to power, and tile maps
Hello! First, an apology for the last issue. Links from the Washington Post are not playing nicely with Revue at the moment, and it messed up the formatting, meaning there was a random extra link at the end. Boo!
This week I was interviewed by Michael about data visualisation and data storytelling. I talk about Fair Warning, my thinking behind a couple of visualisations and projects I've worked on, and what I'm wanting to do next. Read it here.
On the home front
Britons mainly honour Dry January in the breach — www.economist.com
This piece by Marie Segger at The Economist found that Brits tend to google "dry January", and that we tend to drink less in January...BUT that it is not necessarily all down to dry January. We're just drinking less generally.
If you aren't British you might feel a bit confused by this. A Freddo is a small chocolate frog (why? Nobody knows) that was 10p when we were children in the 90s, and is now being sold in some places for much more. Every now and then, we collectively have a national breakdown over this and everyone loses their minds. Can I just say: The chocolate isn't even that good.
Scottish Trunk Road Gritter Tracker
It snowed this week in the UK, which means it's a great time to remember that Traffic Scotland has made a live map which shows you where their gritters are... And the gritters are called things like Sir Andy Flurry and Sir Salter Scott.
Over the pond
Paths to Power: How Every Member Got to Congress — www.nytimes.com
This is such a beautiful data visualisation of the path people take to get to Congress in the US. A lot of the professions are the classic ones like law, business management, and a chunk of them went to private college which is clearly out of reach for most people. Search box is on the top left-hand side if you want to search for your rep.
Population density in the U.S. (1790 - 2010)
This is pretty lovely for an animated map. I remember learning about settlers moving to the west in my history class and so it's nice to see a data vis that quite clearly shows that shift in population over time.
I'm struggling to add Washington Post links in the way I add others, so I'll add them as in-line links... Trump's changing vision of the wall is a nicely illustrated look at the different promises Trump has made about the wall over the years. (H/T In Other News)
Another WaPo piece... 56 people have been shot and killed by the police in 2019 so far. What a horrific statistic.
I like Nathan Yau's work - the interactives are always sleek and nice to use. This is just a simple interactive chart showing average age at which men and women had a baby in the US.
Odds and ends
Do tile maps need to have regular shapes? — questionsindataviz.com
Neil tweeted a gif of a tile-map of the US being created exactly how you'd create new lines in Tetris... [Remember that game? Anyone?] And then I asked him for a link, so here it is. I kind of wasn't sure about it (because...let's be honest, it's hardly going to be useful for anything) but I actually really like it because it's just quirky and retro.
Love this collaboration which looks at the types of news stories that reach public consciousness, and how long they stay there. If that sounds too academic, it's really not - the data is presented in a really nice explorable way.
The economics of streaming is making songs shorter
"Streaming means it pays to keep your songs short." And not only are rappers and popstars shortening their songs, but so are country singers... Funny that it's on Quartz since this sounds much more like something The Pudding would do. (H/T In Other News)
Tidy Tuesday: Are Whedon shows regarded as consistently good?
Spoiler: Yeah. I wrote this piece on Medium about my first attempt at #TidyTuesday. I looked at the IMDB dataset provided by the organisers and used the project to learn more about styling in ggplot2. Includes Github repo if that's of use to anyone who is also wanting to learn.
Meta-data
How the BBC Visual and Data Journalism team works with graphics in R — medium.com
Another piece from the journalists working at the BBC, this discusses how the data journalism team uses R to create graphics. They developed their own package to ensure charts could easily be reproduced, and created a cookbook to help people understand how to make different charts. Fab.
When Charts Go Weird: The Joy of Xenographics
This is from last year, but I only just found it now. (I didn't go to OpenVis in Paris, so I'm using that as my excuse...) The piece discusses how xenographics can be fun alternatives to classic charts like bar, line or pie - and how they're better for certain types of data.
Doing journalism better
This is a new section that likely won't be in every issue, but these next pieces are more generally about journalism as an industry...
Beyond 800 words: What user testing taught me about writing news for young people — medium.com
I thought this was quite interesting. Getting "young people" interested in news and current affairs is a notoriously tricky thing a lot of newsrooms are trying to crack. This piece from the BBC R&D team explains what they learned from experimenting and chatting to young people.
How the Seattle Times is empowering reporters to drive subscriber growth
In the midst of a host of layoffs across media companies, this is a nice short story to read about how the Seattle Times has changed its approach to journalism... Get journalists to think about creating content that will increase subscribers.
Bad chart of the week
I was going to write about a bad chart I've recently seen (the one that occasionally comes back round every now and then - GDP per capita since 1000AD, as 'proof' of capitalism being inherently good). I ended up writing too much to fit in here so I posted it to Medium.
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