February 26, 2012 on Information Graphics, Travel, Work
I just got back from the NICAR conference in St. Louis, where I gave a talk with Bill Keaggy on Best Visualization Practices. There’s delicious stack of links here: http://bit.ly/nicar2012 and the presentation is here (click the settings gear and open speaker notes to find out what we talked about):
Chrys Wu kept a detailed list of links if you want to check out some of the other sessions. I also got the see the St. Louis arch! Very exciting:
Posted by Kat Downs on Sunday, February 26, 2012 at 1:17 pm
Tags: charts, Design and infographics, missouri, nicar, presentations, st. louis, Travel
September 28, 2011 on Information Graphics
In an extremely quick turnaround, I worked with Dan Keating to create this tool that shows you the breakdown of what other people of your age, race, and location make each year. Hopefully in the future we’ll be able to improve it and add some more metrics, but it’s pretty cool for taking less than a day!
Posted by Kat Downs on Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 9:37 pm
Tags: acs, census, charts, Dan Keating, data, income, infographics, The Washington Post
September 18, 2011 on Information Graphics
Today, we came out with a new graphic that looks at the tax breaks on the books this year. It is part of Running in the Red, a series the Post has been running for the past few months, and accompanied Lori Montgomery’s front-page story, “Ever-increasing tax breaks for U.S. families eclipse benefits for special interests,” a great story that explains spending through the tax code.
The graphic is all CSS and JavaScript. With charts that only have bars, it’s simple to dynamically add sized divs with background colors that create charts. The data will update automatically if necessary and it works across all browsers and mobile platforms with no workarounds:
And has details for each of the 172 breaks currently active (see below). Added bonus: I learned a ton about the tax code.
And a couple more (relatively) recent charts:
This one I worked on with Alicia Parlapiano and Neil Irwin. Because I wanted to create animate transitions and interactivity, I used Flash to create this graphic. It has detailed drilldowns to look at employment in each sector of the economy. I tried to inject more annotation into this graphic (and the taxes one above) than we have done in the past with data-driven graphics. Instead of throwing a bunch of data out there, we’re providing more context and guided views — by category and by sector versus a completely self-guided data dive.
This was a fun chart I helped our intern, Heather Billings, with at the beginning of the summer. We used flot to make these charts showing how the lead changed between the Heat and the Mavericks during the NBA finals. This was particularly fun for me because I got really into the NBA finals this year and watched every game. I know, hard to believe, but true. I was a having a great time analyzing the outcome of the games and reading all the news — and if you missed it, this was a great article from Bill Simmons at Grantland.
And another one about when and if China’s economy will pass the United States to become the world’s largest.
Posted by Kat Downs on Sunday, September 18, 2011 at 8:20 pm
Tags: alicia parlapiano, basketball, charts, css, Design and infographics, heather billings, infographics, javascript, Karen Yourish, laura stanton, nba, politics, sports, taxes, The Washington Post, unemployment, Work
December 23, 2010 on Information Graphics
With Tuesday’s apportionment announcement, we decided to create an interactive map that would look at reapportionment over time. Census also created a map like that here.
Gene Thorp created a cartogram with the data that appeared on page 1 of the newspaper — you can check that out here.
Posted by Kat Downs on Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 11:56 am
Tags: census, charts, dailies, Design and infographics, graphics, Maps, politics, population, The Washington Post, Work