There’s less than a month until taxes are due. It’s the most wonderful time of year, isn’t it? As you probably know, there are some changes in deductions, limits, and refund amounts this year, but who the changes affect depends on many variables. For Bloomberg, Ben Steverman and Marie Patino, provide an easier-to-follow breakdown of common groups and variables, how the groups’ total taxes differ from last year, and how...
There's a new hotness in chart town. It's a bar chart. But it moves to show rankings over time. Read More
Other than calls from my wife, I can’t even remember the last call I received that wasn’t a robocall. Based on data from the Robocall Index and the American Community Survey, Sara Fischer for Axios provides this straightforward map of robocalls by state. Tags: Axios, robocalls, spam
The New York Times uses layering to place the Alabama tornadoes in context. (link) Today's wide availability of detailed data allows designers to create dense data graphics like this: The graphic shows the starting and ending locations and trajectory of each tornado, as well as the wind speeds (shown in color). Too much data slows down our understanding of the visual message. The remedy is to subtract. Here is a...
For FiveThirtyEight, William T. Adler and Ella Koeze describe how a metric called partisan bias is used to assess partisan gerrymandering. As you might imagine, it’s fuzzy. Tags: FiveThirtyEight, gerrymandering
We know that people are marrying later in life, but that's not the only shift. The whole relationship timeline is stretching. Read More
Marian Eerens charted the colors of each Adventures of Tintin book cover. The only thing missing is the actual covers on the mouseover. It’s a straightforward thing, but I find these sort of abstract color charts calming for whatever reason. See also the colors of: campaign logos, LEGO kits, Game of Thrones episodes, Mister Rogers’ cardigans, Western films, Avengers comic book covers, science fiction book covers, and more. Tags: color,...
Compared to a computer’s pseudo-random number generator, we are not good at picking random numbers. Ilya Perederiy made a quick game to show how bad you are: Your fingers tend to repeat certain patterns even if you don’t notice it. The program keeps a database of each possible combination of 5 presses, and two counters are stored under each entry — one is for every zero that follows the combination,...
If you’re like me, your first exposure to data visualization was as a consumer. You may have run across a pie chart, or a bar chart, perhaps in a newspaper or a textbook. Thanks to the power of the visual language, you got the message quickly, and moved on. Few of us learned how to create charts from first principles. No one taught us about axes, tick marks, gridlines, or...
