Poverty and Policy

In: Culture Employment History

18 Jul 2012

Some slick programming in this annotated exploration of 50 years of poverty statistics. Tough I’m not a fan of the pie charts, per se, the rollover drill down is a nice idea. Be sure to click on the small “change year” to bring up a timeline slider that updates in real time. Like I said – slick!

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5 Responses to Poverty and Policy

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Carl

July 18th, 2012 at 9:16 am

Let them eat Pie chart ??

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Al

July 19th, 2012 at 10:48 am

This is really good. The pies with overlapping segments help non-numerically-inclined readers intuitively understand the data (part-to-whole with transient groups), the bar charts help you compare. Great flow and progression. Great use of the dotted average bar. Nice unobtrusive interactive element. Really nicely done.

Some of the aesthetics and colour choices aren’t to my personal taste, but it hangs together. I might have worded the labels differently too on the hover-over view to avoid possible misunderstanding (“Average near or in poverty” etc or “National averages: // Near or in poverty // In poverty // …” etc). And trends over time would be great to see, assuming that data exists.

Other than that, really good stuff.

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Al

July 19th, 2012 at 10:51 am

Oh yeah, and, on the hover-over view, it might be nice to see the absolute size of that group compared to the others. E.g. I’m really curious how many single male with kids groups there are compared to the other groups.

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CS

July 20th, 2012 at 7:04 pm

The pie charts here work. The viewer gets a quick sense of the proportion of those in poverty to that of the whole populace. I like the color scheme. It is dramatic and drives the point home. Overall, a very effective presentation.

Does anyone know what software was used to create the visuals?

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AS

July 22nd, 2012 at 5:31 pm

Thanks for the kind words and insightful critiques!

Yes, all the data is available over time — mostly from 1967 to 2010. We’ll be adding trend line charts in the coming weeks (so stay tuned…) as well as a way to download raw data.

We used d3.js and jQuery for the visuals.

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