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From E. B. White

"As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness." Perfect combination of the big and the small. From Letters of Note.

A couple of hours ago, I was telling a colleague of mine how good this Periscopic graphic about gun deaths is over beer. If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out right now. The way that the dots (people) just drop off of their potential lifespans, and how, once the animation gets up to full speed, the whole thing looks like a machine gun firing…it’s super affecting.

But I’m starting to question the editorial judgement a little bit. I took another look at the graphic tonight after finding it to share the link with my colleague. I hadn’t actually realized that you can click on any one of those lines—which, of course, represent real individuals—and be taken to the news story about the corresponding person’s death.

After filtering out all but the deaths in the past seven days, I found and clicked on one that had taken place in my own borough of Brooklyn. Apparently, the victim had stabbed somebody, and then lunged with his knife at the cops who arrived on the scene. The cops ended up shooting and killing him.

I’m not sure that including gun deaths like this one in the graphic was a sound decision. Clearly the graphic was intended to inform the debate about gun regulation in the US. It was published when Sandy Hook was very fresh in everyone’s mind and Wayne LaPierre was on TV almost every day.

So, in addition to tacitly arguing for tighter gun control, is it also arguing that police officers shouldn’t have guns? And, is it really fair to say that someone who gets shot after threatening a group of cops with a knife has had his life stolen from him? He played some role in his demise, no?

Obviously, I have no idea what actually happened that night. The cops could have been trigger-happy or bigoted or just a bunch of dumbasses. Maybe they did fire without cause and maybe they did steal a life. I’m not sure.

But the point is that Periscopic isn’t either. They made the decision to include all gun deaths and to declare the consequent lost years of the victim “stolen” regardless of who fired the gun and whether or not it was self-defense.

And I understand—there are a lot of gun deaths in this country, unfortunately, and going through every individual death probably isn’t all that feasible for the Periscopic team.

But if you’re going to take on a project this ambitious and important, I think that you should do your best not to be misleading. A simple way to do that would be to not include cases where a cop was the shooter. Surely, police officers have caused a slew of unnecessary gun deaths. But save that injustice for a different graphic.

This is rad. Shan Carter at the NY Times made a bookmarklet called SVG crowbar that, when you click it, downloads (or maybe dislodges?) any SVG elements on a webpage into a file that you can open with programs like Inkscape and Illustrator. So, you can make something for the web with, say, D3, and then grab your creation and modify it for print or a slideshow or whatever.

But wait, what's the big deal? You could always just open up your web inspector, copy the SVG element into a text editor, save it as an .svg file and do the same thing.

Well...that's not quite true. If any of the SVG elements are formatted in an external style sheet (which, of course, is the thing to do) then all of that formatting is lost when you extract the SVG manually. So, your custom helvetica shows up as arial and all your translucent paths are completely opaque. Shan's crowbar, on the other hand, is actually smart enough to insert all of your CSS style rules into the SVG file that it spits out. Rad.

Of course, this tool is most useful for designers and data visualizers who work at shops that make stuff for both the web and print (like the Times). But I'll probably use it from time to time at Quartz (which is only digital). I still do make static graphics, and backwards as it may seem, I can imagine myself wanting to make one in D3. Things like streamgraphs and force-directed layouts are impossible (or at least absurd) to do by hand. I'd be tempted to build chart like that in D3, then pry it out with SVG crowbar and make a high-res image for the web.

Knew it. Tom Waits really has had the most consistently good career of any singer-songwriter.

From Jonathan Corum's presentation about storytelling with graphics at the Tapestry conference. Definitely worth reading the whole thing.

Income has only grown for the top 1% of earners in the US since the end of the recession. For the rest, it's actually shrunk a little. (from Emmanuel Saez, at Berkeley. Here's the paper)

I came across Neil Freeman's work for the first time recently. He's an urban planner and artist living in New York who makes great things. One of them is a twitter feed for the Gowanus Canal that tweets about the canal's high and low tides in very human English. The project I've linked to here is an encyclopedic architectural survey of Brooklyn, with a breakdown of building types, over 2,000 photos, and complete demographic details.

From the description: "The subject of continuous residential development since the mid-1600s, every trend in American architecture and urban planning has inscribed itself onto Brooklyn's moraine and salt marshes."

#Urban Planning

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