Naked Data

All the data you can eat

US Elections

The big elections map wrap-up, by an expert

Who better to comment on maps? Stamen's lead cartographer, Alan McConchie, takes a retrospective on his favourite maps to emerge from the US elections. We've covered a lot of these individually, but there are a few gorgeous examples that we missed, like Le Monde's brilliant mix of cartogram and t...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

The ultimate election-nerd page

While the big news agencies impressed with great graphics, magnificent maps and cutting commentary, a little open-sourced page hosted on Github that valiantly scraped away at the New York Times became the go-to source for election results. (Since some of those results are still trickling in, the ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Pollster: It’s not us, it’s you

Another election, another disaster for pollsters who could have done better predicting from the swoop of the swallows than the responses from the American public. But the problem isn't the pollsters, claims chief Haruspex at Ntrailz, Matthew Dessem: it's us. We just didn't understand the prophets...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

The political winds are a-changin’

Not content with the usual selection of elections maps, Washington Post was inspired by the amount of hot air being generated by the politicians, and used wind map code to produce this sexy-as-hell election map. I'm blown away.

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

The Guardian’s dataviz tour of the US elections

The Guardian gets deep into the election data with a smorgasbord of visualisations, starting from the swing arrow maps that proved very popular in this US election, to some kind of bubble bar graph that is probably a bit more form than function. Still, we forgive them the bubble-bar for that beau...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Spaghetti Western

The New York Times has built handsome spaghetti line charts showing which counties swung more Democrat or Republican over the last four US elections, in a very slick scrollytelling format. It's immediately clear that rural, educated voters moved the dial for Biden, but I'm just as interested in t...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

A toll for polls

The failure, for the second US Presidential election in a row, of polling, has plenty of people asking whether polls are useless, damaging, or both. But this isn't a new conversation. In one of many classic examples, the 1948 Truman vs Dewey polling in favour of Dewey convinced the media so much ...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Winning big with US election maps

I'm a big fan of election maps, having built one myself, and (like everyone else) I've had one eye on the results coming in on the too-close-to-call 2020 US Presidential Election all day. After trying quite a few options, I settled on Al Jazeera, which opted for a cartographic instead of a geogra...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Republicans not so conservative with Corona

Dan Goodspeed has made one of those racing-bar-charts, this time showing Coronavirus infections per 100,000 by US state, and coloured by their voting partisanship. You can tell where this is going, but seeing the swathe of red still comes as a bit of a shock - of the 25 worst-affected states curr...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Umbilical Ruminations

Biden snaking his way to victory

Of all the election graphs, and there are many, this is my favourite: FiveThirtyEight's "snake path". In one graph, you can see who's going to win (I think we can safely say Joe Biden, despite his son's antics), and more importantly, why. Until I saw this graph, I didn't understand the US Preside...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Lies, damn lies, and election results

With the world obsessing on the US elections, it's time to (once again) go through the problems of visualising election results. The biggest issue, as Cairo Alberto has eloquently pointed out: "But acres don't vote. People do." The big areas on the map tend to be ironically the least-populated, a...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

You can judge a burb by its colour

The New York Times data viz team takes a different look at predicting which way US voters will swing -- the colour of their environment. Green areas (denoting farmland and rural areas) voted Trump, while grey areas (generally urban) voted (unsuccessfully) for Clinton. I'm not sure whether this in...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 months ago

A chilling warning from FiveThirtyEight: Don’t count Trump out

Having been caught out by the last US Presidential Election, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver is going to great pains to try and explain that polls are both fallible and routinely misread: "... the FiveThirtyEight presidential election forecast, which we launched today, still has Trump with a 29 per...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 months ago

US poll-predicting guru reckons Trump is going down

Professor of history at the American University, Allan Lichtman, has managed to correctly predict every US presidential election since 1984. He has 13 key questions that he asks, and six or more for either candidate predicts the winner. Even though I've given you the outcome, this New York Times ...

Jason Norwood-Young

5 months ago