I spoke this afternoon at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, about the interactive graphics and data visualizations we produce at The New York Times. Here’s the list of the interactive graphics that I mentioned.
4 comments » I’ve created two bookmarklets for CountingTweets — just drag them up to your toolbar. Then, when you’re on a site where you want to see how often links on the page have been twittered, just click the bookmarklet and wait a few seconds. The first bookmarklet shows you stats for just URLs on the page that have a date or ID in them and ignores links for site nav items. The second bookmarklet does all links on the page.
As long as we’re on the topic of century-plus-old presidential elections, earlier this week I drew a cartogram of the 1860 presidential election results for the Opinionator’s day-by-day blog of the Civil War.
Read the full post about How (and Where) Lincoln Won on Opinionator.
Or at least the first one published on the day after the election? A year or two ago, I went digging thru the archives to see if I could find the first election results map published in an edition of the Times dated the day after the election. This is the earliest one I found, which was published in the Wednesday, November 4, 1896 edition of the paper and headlined “A map showing how all the states in the union have cast their electoral votes, those which have gone for M’Kinley being in white and those for Bryan in black.”
The map occupied about half the front page — which also had an impressive amount of election results tables intermingled with the stories above.
The speed with which the results made it into print boggles the mind given the technology of the day (especially considering that in the last few elections in the 2000s, with all of the technology available to us, there have been a number of states that we haven’t been able to call in the Wednesday paper).
There’s more than a few things I’m not clear on — Was it a morning or afternoon edition of the paper? How did they count votes so quickly? Who compiled the results — was it The Associated Press? Does the map show the final results? The story above says that “In the East, every State from Maine to North Carolina, inclusive, has gone for McKinley and Hobart, except for Virginia, which is in doubt.” Yet on the map, there’s no indication that the status of Virginia is uncalled at that point. (And in fact, in the final electoral vote, which you can see at Dave Leip’s Atlas of Presidential Elections, you’ll notice a number of states that are incorrectly shaded in the map — Virginia, North Carolina and a handful of others in the West.)
Over the next few elections, the maps grew more sophisticated. In 1904, we have hatching, an actual map key, a much less crude rendition of the U.S., and labels on the map with the number of electoral votes for each state.
And 1916 marks the first appearance on the map of one of my favorite terms of the era: the “doubtful” states —those for which not enough results were in to call a winner — in this case, California and New Mexico with their 16 electoral votes.
They’re obviously a far cry from the interactive, updated-by-the-minute maps we publish today, but incredibly impressive for the era. It makes me wonder if the artists who produced those first maps had the same thrill at seeing the results in the next day’s newspaper that we now get from having interactive maps online and updating on election night.
(And if anyone has examples of earlier election maps from The Times or other papers, send them my way: mericson at ericson.net. Would love to add them to my collection.)
We’ve slowly started turning on some of our Election 2010 results pages for the general election in November. Right now, they’re obviously all zeros — and the interactive maps aren’t live yet either — but on election night, we’ll have a full assortment of interactive House maps, Senate maps and Governor maps, including some slick new features from Matthew Bloch. Plus, we’ll have state election result pages for every state.
Update: I’ve got a much improved version of the script that also exports artboards and adds a PDFs option. Get the improved version.
Hot on the heels of my Illustrator script to export artboards as PNG files, here’s one that exports Illustrator layers as PNG files.
To use the script, download Export-Layers-as-PNG.jsx and put in your Illustrator scripts folder (usually in Applications/Adobe Illustrator/Presets/Scripts/). Restart Illustrator, and run the script by going to “File > Scripts > Export Layers as PNG”.
You can try it out on the sample file layer-test.ai.
When you run this script on this file, it will export 2 PNGs: Play.png and Pause.png. The “+Button” and “+Gradient” layers will appear in the background of both exported files, and it will skip the “-Pause 2″ and “Layer 5″ layers.