Distribution Chart, with thanks to Tufte

Here is a second, non-geographical treatment of London Borough data. I've taken some of Tufte's thoughts about Data Ink so most of what's there is data, not decoration. Hence the axes, which are limited to the actual range of the data, letting you can sense where the zero point would have been. Then labelling the axes just to show bounds, median and quartile points. Next I will find 33 shades that are distinct but clear on a white background.

On the LeafIndex London page, click Crimes / Distribution.

Side by Side, or Cats Cradle?

I wanted to try some London visualisations not based around the map. So here are the thirty three boroughs in terms of public engagement in the Arts. Another victory for Raphael was the mouse over behaviour on the lines. On the LeafIndex London page, click Arts / Side by Side.

KML - My Acronym of the Week

We’re using co-ordinate based mapping for our data on London and various UK Maps. We’re thankful for the awesome amount of data held in KML files by the Google Earth aficionados. Our code uses LINQ to find the co-ordinates, Regex to parse them, and Raphael to draw them. It’s all neat and seems quick enough. Coloured London borough maps are now no problem.

If the statistics are boring

If the statistics are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. Finding the right numbers requires as much specialized skill - statistical skill - and hard work as creating a beautiful design or covering a complex news story.

Edward R.Tufte The Visual Display of Quantative Information p80

Blair at Chilcot

We analysed the text of Tony Blair's answers at the Chilcot Inquiry. We were curious to know how often he said I or We in his answers. Our visualisation took the form of a condensed bar chart, above the line for I and We, below the line for length of answer.

No surprises that he said I 50% more often than We - 932 times against 627.

The data came from The Guardian's Datablog.

The Population Crash

We picked up on Fred Pearce's article in The Guardian on falling birth rates. Our visualisation shows the places expecting 10% plus falls in population, represented by a shadow falling across the countries' flags.



Source data: World populations by country - up to 2050
Flags: CIA World Factbook

Technologies

We’re targeting various browsers. Internet Explorer version 6 and above, because it’s there. Firefox because it’s better. Chrome because it may be the future. We hope to have an acceptable performance in all of these, but we know which one we use for preference.

To get going, we learned five technologies in a week.

• jQuery for making JavaScript easy to work with


• LINQ for loading XML files


• Git as a repository of our work


• Canvas as a first approach to portable visualisation


• Raphael as a better approach to portable visualisation

Our leaf image comes from forestry.about.com