A Data Visualization Newsletter

In the wake of the 2016 election, most media outlets reported on the election’s outcome using county-level voting data. But now, with the help of doctoral student Ryne Rohla, the New York Times just released a far more detailed map that shows the results down to the voting precinct. It allows for incredibly granular analysis of political preferences and voting enclaves, though the map has also sparked a serious debate about whether traditional methods of visualizing election results are misleading.

This piece from Nadieh Bremer, the creative force behind Visual Cinnamon, is a data-driven look at the ways that various societies interpret and mythologize the stars. She examines the constellations from 28 different cultures dating back to ancient times to compare and contrast the ways they’ve divided up the night sky.

In his most recent piece, The Pudding’s Matt Daniels explores a new economic indicator of a city’s prosperity: number of departing flights. An analysis of flights per day from the world’s megacities reveals a massive disparity, with cities like Paris tallying almost 1,000 while Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, averages only 13. As urbanization accelerates in cities like Kinshasa, we’ll have to see if economic development can keep pace.

Pie charts have been recognized as a sub-optimal way to display data for over a century. So why are they still so popular? Manuel Lima, a design lead at Google, dives into the history of pie charts to reveal why we’ve continued to use them so often, and why we probably won’t stop anytime soon.