Today is the Democratic primary for the Washington, D.C. mayoral election. Since half of our team lives in D.C. this race is important to us, and so we made this map to visualize the relationships between geography, voter registration, and candidate party. We’ll update it tomorrow with actual election results.
At HaystaqDNA we often try to visualize many attributes of a data set simultaneously. Doing so better reveals the underlying story of the data but often poses technical and perceptual challenges—besides being difficult to code, complex data visualizations may overwhelm viewers and actually muddle the message. We think that this map strikes the right balance between intuitiveness and richness—in other words, it displays a good “data-to-ink ratio”.
Our favorite tool for data visualization is the D3 JavaScript library. It’s incredibly powerful and customizable (albeit harder to use than Excel, Python, or R.) We’ve found that this power enables us to explore a dataset more carefully and thoughtfully, and only then take out our crayons and use our imagination.
Tune in tomorrow for ward-by-ward election results!