2012: The Year of the Amateur
One of the topics that seemed to keep cropping up in the news this year was the growing power of the amateur in public life. This trend is not necessarily new but it has been gaining momentum as modern technologies make it easier for the average person to create things …
Infographics and Data Visualization (Week 5/6)
I took part in a brief discussion on the student forum after the Week 4 project and it made me realize that I’d been spending so much time trying to create a functional interactive graphic in Tableau that I was missing out on practicing some of the basic techniques of …
Infographics and Data Visualization (Week 4)
The assignment for Week 4 is the based on data used in a recent Guardian article on U.S. unemployment. Having used Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data for many years at my previous job, I am far more familiar with this topic than I was with the data we used for last …
A Thanksgiving Meal Preparation Timeline
The art of timing the preparation of Thanksgiving dishes takes years of experience and perhaps more than a few hard lessons in the kitchen (ever have anyone de-bone a turkey?). For those less experienced chefs, I’ve always felt that a good inforgraphic might help organize the work so that all the …
Infographics and Data Visualization (Week 3)
The goal of this week’s assignment is to review some global aid data from the Guardian and evaluate how this information should be presented. This is a two-part assignment and I have been able to download the data and let my thoughts percolate over the past few days. The focus is on the …
Infographics and Data Visualization (Week 2)
For week two of the course, we’ve been asked to take a look at this interactive graphic from the New York Times, which compares the different words that Democrats and Republicans speakers used during their respective conventions. Overall, I thought that the graphic was pretty good but there were a few …
Trends in NFL Football Scores (Part 1)
One of the goals I set for myself this summer was to learn a bit about D3, a visualization toolkit that can be used to manipulate and display data on the web. Considering that the trees are bare and we’ve already had our first frost here in Wisconsin, you can safely assume that I …
CNN published the mugshots of all of the biker gang members who were arrested after the recent shootout in a Waco, TX restaurant. There were a total of 171 pictures, all in the same standard pose and most in the same standard orange jumpsuit: Seeing all of these pictures got …
There’s nothing too complicated about this post. I’ve been interested in creating an illustration of the U.S. Interstate system for awhile but my initial concept of a “subway-style” diagram of the network had already been done. After some recent experimentation with the D3 Javascript library, I decided that it might …
My family visited Washington D.C. last year for Spring Break and, during our 12-hour drive, I remember noticing a subtle change in the names of the cities and towns we were passing through. In the beginning, the place names had a familiar mid-western flavor; one that mixed Native American origins …
I have been reading a book on the development of the English language recently and I’ve become fascinated with the idea of word etymology — the study of words and their origins. It’s no secret that English is a great borrower of foreign words but I’m not enough of an …