Voting infoviz
June 5th, 2008 | robots + kittens
If you follow 37Signals blog, you’ve already seen this, but I just had to jot something down on this. This NYTimes interactive graphic showing how we voted in the Democratic primary is brilliantly executed.
It almost completely ignores M$ chartjunk, and instead focuses on states as blocks, which move according to the percentage of people who voted for Clinton or Obama. The descriptive labels (hover over a state block) are written in plain English.
Best of all, they have used paging arrows and some animation to tell a story, simply by the ordering of each demographic segment in the paging: men to women to blacks, incomes levels, education levels.
This is so much more compelling than dumping a massive spreadsheet of data on me. It’s not the full story, of course, but it creates a compelling introduction that may just spur me to investigate — and read more.