January 2011
33 posts
1 tag
Viz on Vacation
I’m in Taipei, Taiwan for the next 10 days. I’ll post the spots we visit on this map:
WordClouds: President Obama's 2011 SOTU Address vs...
thanh-tan:
Key words in President Obama’s speech (left): people, new, make, jobs, years, America, government
Key words in GOP response (right): government, spending, debt, president, now
3 tags
State of the Union
Yes. The State of the Union address, which is like the Oscars or Super Bowl for politics nerds like me, is tonight. Here’s a look back at President Obama’s speech last year:
And the Republican response from Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell:
Interesting. Both men used “Americans” quite often. Obama stressed “people,” while McDonnell focused on...
1 tag
Vintage
(h/t @JasonStoddard)
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Visualize Amazon Inventory
Amaztype lets you visualize Amazon’s online catalog by subject title, author name, etc. Here I chose data and visualization:
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Texas: 70% Republican?
A colleague today asked for a spreadsheet copy of the Tribune’s Directory, which has biographical, political and official details about 242 elected officials in Texas (statewide, Legislature, high courts, congress, etc). Turns out only 70 of them are Democrats, whose ranks were thinned considerably after the Republican wave in November:
Or…
Or…
6 tags
Financing Texas Elections: 2010
Another cross-post from my work blog:
The 2010 political campaigns are over, but looking back at the fundraising and spending that financed them is now fully possible thanks to records made public by the Texas Ethics Commission after Tuesday’s filing deadline.
With this new data, which cover donations and expenditures from October 24 to December 31, we can now illustrate campaign activity for...
4 tags
Once, Twice, Three Times a Governor
A cross post from my work blog:
Most people know that Gov. Rick Perry, inaugurated to a third full term Tuesday, has served longer than any other chief executive in Texas history.
What’s remarkable, though, is just how much longer than the state’s previous governors — even those who’ve served during the modern era, according to historical data maintained by the Legislative...
4 tags
D.C. Bound
My wife and I are moving to Washington, D.C., in the coming weeks. She’ll be working for NPR, and I’m staying in my current job working remotely. Our move got me thinking about this fabulous migration map created last year by Jon Bruner, an editor at Forbes who works interactive projects.
Click the image to play with the map, which uses IRS returns data to determine inward and outward...
2 tags
'I Have a Dream'
I’m getting bored with word clouds, but I couldn’t think of a better way to make a visualization in honor of the late Martin Luther King, Jr. Here is his “I Have a Dream Speech”:
Also, here’s an interactive word tree:
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Is 'Green Hornet' Super Bad?
“The Green Hornet“ opened this weekend to lukewarm reviews by critics, earning low scores on movie score aggregators like Metacritc and Rotten Tomatoes. Here’s one of my favorites: “A big, sloppy, loud, grating mess of a movie,” wrote the Detroit News’ Adam Graham.
Elise wondered how “Hornet” compared to other movies based on comic books characters...
3 tags
German Political Donations
From Visual Complexity: “This radial convergence interactive graphic shows the money flow from private donators to parties in the German Bundestag.” Pretty fancy:
Analyzing Twitter Followers
Using Export.ly, I downloaded a detailed spreadsheet of all my Twitter followers. This word cloud shows the most common words in their bios:
Source: Wordle
3 tags
How the World is Governed
This interactive map, created by Many Eyes user Vortextual, categorizes government regime types by country, according to the CIA World Factbook:
Source: Download Data
On the Records: Visualizing Today's Speeches
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'Map-of-a-tweet'
This is an oldie, but a goodie: A color-coded chart that helps decipher the Twitter API, created by the company’s platform services lead, Raffi Krikorian. Each color represents a different field of data created each time you tweet. All this data is available to developers to build cool stuff like TweetStats, Klout and the like:
4 tags
Mapping 'My' Austin
Using a nifty tool created by programmer Steven Lehrburger, I made this heat map to represent my last 300 check-ins to Foursquare, the location-based service. Here’s where I go:
(Hat tip: Zachary M. Seward)
Pomp, Circumstance — and Consequences
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Weekly Church Attendance
These maps show the percentage of adults in each state who said they attended church each week (or almost each week) in 2009:
Click the image below for an interactive version, which categorizes states in quintiles by rank (1-10, 11-20, etc., so the colors don’t match perfectly to the above map):
Source: Gallop, 2009. The margin of sampling error for most states is ±1 to ±2 percentage...
Pomp, Circumstance — and Consequences
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3 tags
Charting Home Improvement
I spent the morning replacing old door knobs and power outlets around the house. These items were purchased from both Lowe’s and Home Depot — America’s two retail home improvement giants. The stores in our neighborhood are next to one another, and I sometimes can’t decide which one to choose.
Perhaps investors feel the same way? This interactive chart, made with Google’s...
3 tags
Diverging Views of America
Ronald Brownstein writes today about the “daunting and even historic” rejection of Democrats by white voters in last year’s mid-term elections. The story also links to this cool graphic, which illustrates the divide between whites and non-whites, according to their answers in exit polls:
Graphic by Brian McGill.
sazerac asked: Does the dog make the charts? Be honest.
On the Records: The Bills So Far
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6 tags
Pigs, Cows, Chickens: A Map
Inspired by Bill Rankin’s maps, I downloaded the U.S. Census of Agriculture, which counted the number of food animals sold and moved off farms in each American county during the 2007 calendar year.
This map below, created in ArcGIS 3D Analyst, details only those figures for cows, pigs and chickens. Darker colors in the respective food categories represent higher county-by-county animal...
tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?
elisehu asked: Hi Matt, this is an interesting idea. What got you into data?
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Partisan Control in Congress
Republicans today take back control of the U.S. House of Representatives, ending four years with the Democrats in charge. This chart, courtesy of Wikipedia, visualizes partisan control in that chamber since 1855:
Here’s the same period for the U.S. Senate:
3 tags
Searching for Salsa
Who doesn’t like salsa, right? It’s America’s number-one condiment, at least in the mind of George Costanza. But not all states like it the same, apparently, according to Google, which ranks places by their search terms.
This map shows the volume of Google searches for the word “salsa” in the food and drink category, which filters out searches for, say, “salsa...
3 tags
Texas Secedes
A friend and colleague contributed today’s visualization, a word cloud of the 1861 Texas Ordinance of Secession:
Source: Wordle
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Dallas Cowboys History
Let’s face it: This is a dreadful season for Dallas Cowboys fans. Romo went down, Uncle Wade got fired and the future remains uncertain. Still, historically speaking, the season hasn’t been that bad.
These interactive line charts, made with the Google Visualization API, track the team’s win-loss record since 1960, broken down by home and road games. You’ll notice that...
4 tags
2010 Movie Sales
Watching The King’s Speech yesterday, I wondered how the various major movies genres and rating levels fare against one another at the box office.
Using data from The Numbers, a site that tracks Hollywood sales and stars, and I filtered the list down to the eight most common genres — and only those films that grossed more than $1 million. I uploaded the data to Many Eyes, a free site owned...
Confidential Conflicts
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