Maps in the wild

For the New York Times, Eve Kahn describes the use of maps outside of looking up directions:

Cartographic décor can help sate fundamental human needs to feel oriented. “Maps are inherently trusted — there’s something about them that makes people feel secure,” said PJ Mode, a map scholar and collector who is donating his holdings to Cornell University. His main focus is “persuasive cartography”: maps meant to sway public opinion, for instance by advocating abolition in the early 1800s, or women’s suffrage or warmongering in the 1910s. Mr. Mode likes to quote what the writer and aviator Beryl Markham imagined that maps wanted to say to their users: “follow me closely, doubt me not. … Without me, you are alone and lost.”

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Consumer confidence in current economic conditions

For NYT Opinion, Nate Silver compares consumer confidence between two surveys. The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment focuses more on personal spending, whereas the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey. Usually, the estimates follow each other, but there’s been a split the past few years, as shown in the difference chart above.

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NYT Flash-based visualizations work again

In the 2000s, if you wanted to make interactive or animated visualization for the web, Flash was the main option. When Flash lost support and fell off the internet, a solid decade of great visualization no longer worked.

The New York Times has resurrected their archives with a Flash emulator. So pieces that were relegated to static thumbnail images are back. See the box office streamgraph that once upset many, the multi-line chart showing jobless rates for people like you, and the interactive stacked area chart on how people spend their day.

I don’t know what NYT is using as their emulator, but I’m guessing it’s similar to the open source Ruffle. I hope other news outlets follow. It’s great to see my favorite visualizations working again. [via EagerEyes]

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Tracking operations in an online scam labor camp

Neo Lu was scammed into a labor camp. In an effort to escape and expose the operation, he began to send information to The New York Times from within.

Mr. Lu said he pleaded to be freed, but his captors refused. They put him to work as an accountant, and over months he tracked millions of dollars in illicit income and managed their day-to-day expenses.

While he was still inside the camp, Mr. Lu contacted The New York Times. He sent hundreds of pages of financial records and photos and videos of the site, hoping to expose the operation at some point.

I was probably slack jawed most of the time while reading this. The graphics and photos about the inner workings and how the scam works, dubbed “pig butchering,” move the story forward.

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Data portrait of a life with long Covid

Giorgia Lupi, known for using data visualization to connect real life and numbers, has been dealing with long Covid for the past three years. In a visual guest essay for NYT Opinion, Lupi describes her experience of fear, pain, and hope using a spreadsheet and a diary of brush strokes.

I thought that if I collected enough data, I would eventually figure out what was going wrong. But no matter how much data I collected or how many correlations I tried to draw, answers eluded me. Still, I couldn’t stop tracking. My spreadsheet was the only thing I could control in a life I no longer recognized.

In 2015, Lupi worked on Dear Data, which focused on the little joys of life through visualization-based postcards. This moving piece uses a similar style but is on the opposite end of the emotional spectrum.

Worth your time.

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World map of illustrated animals

During a three-year span, Anton Thomas illustrated a world map of 1,642 animals native to each region. It’s called Wild World. The New York Times highlighted the work:

“We don’t see the latitude and longitude lines of maps,” he said. “We see the world, in our heads, through icons.”

For Mr. Thomas, this equates to a kind of “emotional geography,” where features with greater emotional heft — the New York City skyline, say, or the Golden Gate Bridge — may take up more space.

“There are animals the sizes of mountain ranges on my map,” he said. “But you know what? The African lion should tower over Kilimanjaro, if we’re drawing an emotional map.”

Prints for Wild World, among other illustrated maps, are available in Thomas’ shop.

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Life in the Gaza Strip

The New York Times put together an image of what life is like in Gaza right now: bombing, death, food and water shortage, and limited medical supplies. A 3-D basemap of the Gaza Strip sets the foundation of the story and layers of individual stories and overall destruction display on top.

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Change in commute times in major cities

Using GPS data processed by Replica, Lydia DePillis, Emma Goldberg, and Ella Koeze, for The New York Times, show how commutes have changed post-pandemic. The roads in major cities are a little bit less congested and the traffic moves a bit faster.

The line chart above shows average speeds in 2022 relative to 2019. So you can see in most places people driving faster and more so during rush hour.

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Maui fires timeline, a visual reconstruction of the events

Using a combination of weather reports, videos, and 911 calls, The New York Times uses mixed media to show the events leading up to the wildfire in Lahaina, Maui.

Firefighters had rescued dozens of people from the seawall by 2 a.m. The fire continued spreading into the next morning. To the north, more residents, unsure of the risk to them, were roused from their homes when flames suddenly reached their streets. The fire also spread to the town’s southern edge, where the police worked to evacuate residents.

The inferno ultimately consumed thousands of buildings, stretching across more than three miles of Lahaina’s waterfront.

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Getting a reservation at a busy restaurant, gamified

When you score a reservation at a busy restaurant, it can feel like you just won a modest lottery. However, getting a reservation is not just randomness. You’re up against others vying for the same seats, and you have to work within the seating arrangements of the restaurant. You need a strategy.

For The New York Times, Priya Krishna, Umi Syam and Aliza Aufrichtig frame strategies in the context of getting a reservation at Semma, a restaurant in New York City. They documented their reservation quest through the service Resy.

I enjoyed the pixel view and game metaphor. All it needed was some 8-bit music.

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