#jon schwabish

[urbaninstitute]

Too often our work is stymied when we can't gain access to essential data; eight recommendations for policy leaders.

Last week, Sen. Patty Murray & Rep. Paul Ryan introduced legislation that could improve federal policy by expanding the availability of data that can fuel actionable research.

This is great news. But, too often, our work is stymied when we can't gain access to essential data—data collected & controlled by the federal government. Here are a few ways to mitigate that.

[thumbsupviz]

As NCAA realignment continues, this graphic from the New York Times does a nice job of tracing out the changes. Notice also the "sparkline" in the text at the top, a subject Andy Kirk from Visualisingdata.com discussed in a recent blog post. 

JS

[thumbsupviz]

Nice scatterplot shown on the I Love Charts Tumblr. The scatterplots are very simple and split by offense and defense, which helps reduce clutter that might occur should they all be placed on the same chart. The best-fit lines are inserted separately by position.

-JS

[thumbsupviz]

Tower infographic from the folks at Visually. Although very tall--which begs the question of whether users prefer such long infographics--the story is told quite well and helps lend a nice view of our perception of time. The bars show progressive segmentation, visualizing how the time we experience is minuscule in comparison to the timeline of the universe.

JS 

[thumbsupviz]

Nice approach by the US Department of Agriculture to demonstrate the uncertainty surrounding estimates of participation in SNAP (food stamp) participation. This floating bar chart is a cleaner alternative to the box-and-whisker plot, which can sometimes appear overly cluttered. The sorting—from states with the highest participation to the lowest—makes the story easy to read at a glance. The original version can be found here.

JS

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I really like these floating bar charts as a cleaner, sleeker alternative to the box and whisker plot. It’s also easy to read at a glance; we can see patterns almost instantly since the designer purposefully ordered the bars from greatest to least.

AKE

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This chart is strong on communicating a lot with a fast glance. Awesome. I think I’d gray the percentages on either end of each bar, though. Or make them smaller. It’s feeling ever so slightly cluttered. But the bars themselves are super clear and help the reader make sense, quickly.

SE