News / visualization

  • Calculating debt as a percentage of GDP

    What's a good measure of U.S. debt as a percentage of GDP over time? We take that into our poster History of the American Presidency

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  • Early reviews are in: “A Visual History of the American Presidency”

     By Eliza Keller (Originally published on April 30, 2010) We recently put out a beta version of our upcoming print, A Visual History of the American Presidency, on Mturk for proofreading and suggestions for improvement. We’re still working out the final kinks and incorporating suggestions from beta users/viewers, but we’re looking forward to a release soon! (The release is here now! - edited in September, 2012) In the meantime, check out some turkers’ reviews: “I felt that the chart was very informative and useful.” “Overall: Great looking poster, the graphs and charts make it easier and more interesting to read. [The] simple color...

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  • SCOTUS Sources

     BY NGP (Originally published on April 9, 2010) Since we published our approach to A Visual History of the Supreme Court of the United States, we got quite a few requests for the sources of the poster. We decided to publish them here, with links. Comments are welcome! Epstein, Lee, Thomas G. Walker, Nancy Staudt, Scott Hendrickson, and Jason Roberts. (2010). “The U.S. Supreme Court Justices Database.” Chicago, IL: Northwestern University School of Law, January 26. http://epstein.law.northwestern.edu/research/justicesdata.html. Andrew D. Martin and Kevin M. Quinn. 2002. “Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953-1999.”...

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  • Charting the SCOTUS "river"

     BY NGP (Originally published on August 19, 2009) The Supreme Court chart visualizes the timelines of justices on the Court as a river, flowing up when there are more appointees by Republican presidents and flowing down with more Democratic appointees. (We take significant liberties with justices before the establishment of those two parties, aligning Democratic-Republicans with Democrats and aligning Whigs and Federalists with Republicans.) We know that many current observers view the progression of the Court through a partisan lens, assuming that Republicans aim to make a more conservative Court while Democrats seek to appoint more liberal members. Ideology has...

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