Randall Munroe, Kelsey Harris, and Max Goodman for xkcd mapped all the challengers for the the upcoming midterm elections. Names are colored by political party. They are sized by the level of office a candidate is running for and the chances of success. (I’m not totally sure how that scale works though.) Interact with the map to focus on regions, and click on names, which directs you to the candidate’s election site.

Wow.

I really like what The New York Times has been doing with augmented reality lately. What usually feels gimmicky is used as a tool to provide scale and detail and to invite closer observation. In their most recent, the Times got in the Halloween spirit and showed the “monsters that live on you.” You can view it in the browser, but it doesn’t quite compare to seeing a human-sized cockroach sitting your living room.

Over the next few months, I’ll be looking more closely at the available visualization apps to see what works and what doesn’t. In this issue, I start with Flourish.

Shirley Wu used a tree metaphor to represent the interactions of five individuals with an SFMOMA texting service:

Last June, SFMOMA launched Send Me SFMOMA, a service where individuals could text a variety of requests – “send me love”, “send me hope”, “send me smiles” – and SFMOMA would respond with an artwork that best matched the request. They received over 5 million texts from hundreds of thousands of individuals over the course of a year.

And they’ve asked me to do something fun with that data.

Each tree represents a day, and each leaf or flower represents something that the service sent back.

It’s Halloween. Joshua Stevens mapped all the graveyards:

Right away I was struck by the geography. The pattern, however, makes a great deal of sense in the context of American history. Some of the deadliest battles of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars took place in Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.

Get the print version here.

In a time we commit less to memory and rely more on technology supplements, Nicky Case provides an interactive comic to teach the science of spaced repetition, which can be used to “remember anything forever-ish.” My memory is horrible, and it only gets worse with time. I needed this.

Jen Christiansen spoke about her extensive experience as a graphics editor for Scientific American. Her talk notes span a wide range of topics from the “rules”, the spectrum of visualization, and collaboration:

[S]ome of my favorite recent Scientific American graphics are the result of bringing together different artists—plucking experts from each of those groups and matching them up to create a final image that draws upon all of their strengths, not forcing one artist to excel in all areas. For example, I love to take an artist who can develop spot illustrations with a stylus or pen, and pair them up with an artist who can custom code data visualization solutions, as in this example by Moritz Stefaner and Jillian Walters.

From Evogeneao:

This Tree of Life diagram is based primarily on the evolutionary relationships so wonderfully related in Dr. Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale, and timetree.org. The smallest branches are purely illustrative. They are intended to suggest the effect of mass extinctions on diversity, and changes in diversity through time. This diagram is NOT intended to be a scholarly reference tool! It is intended to be an easy-to-understand illustration of the core evolution principle; we are related not only to every living thing, but also to everything that has ever lived on Earth.

Design-wise, there are many things that could’ve made the graphic more readable, but something about it makes me like it just the way it is.

Most people interested in visualization have made a chart with Microsoft Excel. For your basic charts, it’s really easy, and it works well for what it was intended for. The process of visualizing data with methods beyond the standard chart types can be more challenging at times.

Based on data from Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, The Washington Post mapped voter turnout on a diverging color scale. Orange represents lower than average turnout in 2016 and purple represents higher than average.

Not to diminish the meaning of the map, but the most shocking part might be the placement of Hawaii.

High school seniors, in the Political Statistics class at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, built a prediction model for the upcoming elections:

Under the guidance of Mr. David Stein, this model (which we named the Overall Results of an Analytical Consideration of the Looming Elections a.k.a. ORACLE of Blair) was developed by a group of around 70 high school seniors, working diligently since the start of September. Apart from the youth and enthusiasm that went into making it, the advantage our model has over professionally developed models is transparency. Unlike professionals, we need not have any secrets in regards to how our predictions are generated. In fact, the sections that follow attempt to detail exactly how we come up with all of the numbers involved in our model.

I’m so glad this exists and that young people are learning how to make things like this. My high school self is jealous, because the only statistics he got to learn was punched into a TI-83 calculator.

Accurat, in partnership with the Google News Initiative, built an augmented reality app to build statues of hope:

We live in a world awash with information. Every time we walk the street holding our phones, every time we perform a research online or buy a product with our credit card data is created and often time communicated to us. How can we make people care about a specific dataset? How can we form our own opinions and points of view on what matters to us? With Building Hopes we wanted people to take a stance on what they are hopeful for, even in a historical moment that many define as hopeless and bleak, and have them look at Google search data through this framework of their own creation.

There’s a web version, but be sure to check out the AR version if you can. You walk around your area picking stones, each representing something to be hopeful for, and the app points to you to statues nearby that others built.

There are many racial disparities in education. ProPublica shows estimates for the gaps:

Based on civil rights data released by the U.S. Department of Education, ProPublica has built an interactive database to examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline. Look up more than 96,000 individual public and charter schools and 17,000 districts to see how they compare with their counterparts.

Using white students as the baseline, compare opportunity, discipline, segregation, and achievement for black and Hispanic students.

Be sure to click through to a school district or state of interest to see more detailed breakdowns of the measures.

The Washington Post provides a flyover view of the barriers at the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s a combination of satellite imagery, path overlays, and information panels as you scroll. It gives an inkling of an idea of the challenges involved when people try to cross the border.

As I worked on a wide range of charts recently, I got to thinking about workflow. How does one get from dataset to finished data graphic? This is my process.

When you drink bubble tea, ideally you’d like to finish with the same proportions of boba and tea that you started at. Krist Wongsuphasawat took care of the math and provides a simulator for this ever important challenge:

This article simulates an optimized sip based on amount of boba and tea in the straw before sipping (method adopted from this post). The simulation assumes that all bobas sit in the bottom of the cup and stack on top of each other nicely. If you put a straw straight down when there are n layers of bobas, you will get n bobas in the straw. The rest of the straw up to the drink’s height is tea. The drinker sips until all n bobas are in his/her mouth then stop. After each sip these n bobas and tea inside the straw are gradually reduced from the cup.

The final recommendations: use a slim cup, minimize ice, and drink strongly. Mess around with variables here.

A few months back, Microsoft released a comprehensive dataset that included the estimated footprints of all of the buildings in the United States. The New York Times mapped all of it.

The footnote says a lot about their attention to detail:

In some cases, the building shapes generated by Microsoft’s automated process do not match the existing building footprints exactly. We manually corrected as many of these mistakes as we found, or, where available, replaced the shapes using more precise local data sets. Data was unavailable for much of Alaska.