Be sure you don’t miss Alex Vollmer’s excellent review of election day infographics. He wanted to see the margins of victory, percentage of precincts reporting, number of delegates at stake, and other goals. He looked at the New York Times online, CNN, National Public Radio and other media.
analysis & methods
Throwing light on a power company’s data
I guess even the guys who live and breathe data get lost in it sometimes.
At one power company that enlisted the help of Houston-area Visual Numerics, there was so much data that no one knew how to start pulling it apart. Only when company analysts saw it visualized did they know what questions to ask.
Marketing director Alicia McGreevey said, “There’s such a difference looking over rows and rows of numbers versus a 3D picture with peaks and troughs.”
Wall Street Journal tag clouds compare Romney and JFK
Today’s Wall Street Journal Online uses tag clouds—the first I’ve seen on that site—to compare Mitt Romney’s statement on religion with John F. Kennedy’s statement in the fall of 1960 as he ran for president.
It’s great to see the Wall Street Journal getting into information visualization (a.k.a. “infovis” among aficionados).
No big story has popped out at me yet. Smaller stories seem to emerge as I look closer.
As you’d expect, “religion” (in Romney’s statement) and “religious” (in Kennedy’s) pop out to about the same degree in both. Kennedy’s “catholic church” also dominates, while Romney’s “church” is not so prominent.… Read the rest “Wall Street Journal tag clouds compare Romney and JFK”