Data Visualization

Visual storytelling has become a significant component of online journalism, and my work increasingly brings me onto teams with designers who excel at making data understandable via interactive images. This page includes a selection of work where I contributed data analyis and/or database and application programming for a visualization:

Census 2010 participation

USA TODAY, 2010

A small, quick table-based visualization showing the Census 2010 mail participation rate for states, counties and 27,000 cities and towns. Built using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP.NET/C# and SQL Server.

Link: Interactive

Post: Tracking Census 2010 Participation

Entertainment calendars

USA TODAY, 2009-10

To help our entertainment staff catalog and present upcoming releases of movies, books and music, I designed a SQL Server data warehouse with an ASP.NET front end for data entry and search. The app also generates XML to power Flash-based presentations. This example is for winter books in 2010.

Link: Interactive

Campaign finance tracker

USA TODAY, 2008

Based on a data partnership with the Center for Responsive Politics, this interactive shows the flow of contributions from people to candidates, parties and independent groups (527s) during the 2008 presidential election cycle. For the team that built this, I assessed the data from CRP, built a SQL Server database and queries, and programmed the ASP.NET application layer to handle requests from the Flash and return XML.

Link: Interactive

Hospital death rates

USA TODAY, 2008

Medicare's 30-day death and readmission rates for heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia for more than 4,400 U.S. hospitals. Working with reporter Steve Sternberg, we obtained the data under FOIA request. I contributed SQL Server programming and the rewrite of an ASP.NET handler to return XML to the Flash.

Link: Interactive

Census American Community Survey

USA TODAY, 2009

Interactive state map with 12 layers of data from the 2008 American Community Survey release from the U.S. Census Bureau. Again a Flash interactive driven by XML, which our team produced over a weekend during a tight embargo.

Link: Interactive