Washington Post – Page 2

Mapping Hurricane Harvey’s Impact

Published on 29 August 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

The Washington Post maps rainfall and flooding levels in the Houston area.

The New York Times is collecting several maps on two web pages. The first page deals with subjects like rainfall, river level, current and historical hurricane tracks, damage reports, and cities and counties under evacuation orders. Maps on the second page look at Harvey’s impact on the Houston area.

Esri’s U.S. Flooding Public Information Map includes precipitation and flood warnings.

#Harvey in perspective. So much rain has fallen, we've had to update the color charts on our graphics in order to effectively map it. pic.twitter.com/Su7x2K1uuz

— National Weather Service (@NWS) August 28, 2017

Kenneth Field critiques the National Weather Service’s decision to add more colours to their precipitation maps (see above). “Simply adding colours to the end of an already poor colour scheme and then making the class representing the largest magnitude the very lightest colour is weak symbology. But then, they’ve already used all the colours of the rainbow so they’re out of options!”

Mapping Where America Depends on Trade

Published on 7 February 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

The Washington Post maps the parts of the United States most dependent on trade—and thus most at risk if the Trump administration starts a trade war with the U.S.’s trading partners.

More Election Cartography Primers

Published on 1 November 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Today, print subscribers to the New York Times were treated to a fold-out map showing a choropleth map of the 2012 election results at the ZIP code level (above). “The map is part of a special election section that aims to help explain the political geography of the United States — identifying where people who are conservative and liberal live and pointing out how physical boundaries, like the Rio Grande and the Cascade Mountains, often align with political ones,” writes the Times’s Alicia Parlapiano.

Parlapiano’s piece is in fact a lengthy tutorial on how to read election maps, along the lines of the pages I linked to in last week’s post on election map cartography—it outlines the problems of state-level election maps and choropleth maps that privilege area over population, for example, and shows some other ways of depicting the results.

It can’t be a coincidence that in today’s Washington Post we have Lazaro Gamio’s article dramatically highlighting the difference between area and population size with comparative maps. Mark Newman’s cartograms also make an appearance.

I can only conclude that both the Times and the Post are making efforts to educate their readers before the election results start coming in, one week from tonight. (Deep breath.)

Mapping Mosul

Published on 24 October 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

The New York Times is mapping the battle for Mosul on this page; the maps show the changing front lines around the city (see above).

Meanwhile, the Washington Post explains the history of Mosul in five maps.

In the U.S., Toddlers Shoot People Often Enough That It Can Be Mapped

Published on 2 May 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Of all the statistics related to gun violence in the U.S. that could be mapped, this has got to be one of the most bizarre: from the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, the number of times a toddler has shot someone since 2015, by state. [Landon Schnabel]

Data Visualization’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’ and Choropleth Maps

Published on 13 April 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham compares two choropleth maps of U.S. population growth: while they look rather different, they use the same data. “The difference between my map and Pew’s—again, they both use the exact same data set—underscores a bit of a dirty little secret in data journalism: Visualizing data is as much an art as a science. And seemingly tiny design decisions—where to set a color threshold, how many thresholds to set, etc.—can radically alter how numbers are displayed and perceived by readers.” [Andy Woodruff]

(Worth mentioning that this is exactly the sort of thing dealt with in Mark Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps.)