Interactive Graphic

What a Toxic Asset looks like [Planet Money]

by Catherine Mulbrandon

I have been enjoying a series of podcasts by Plant Money’s team in which they bought toxic asset which has more than 2,000 mortgages. They paid $1,000 for a piece that used to be worth around $75,000.

Their interactive graphic shows how this asset was created with mortgages across the country, how many payments they have received from it, and how it has been losing value.

In the beginning Dec 2006, “Toxie” was a little sick

But by July 2010, “Toxie” was a almost dead…

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Animation of Unemployment from 2007-2009 [Slate.com]

by Catherine Mulbrandon

in Other

Screenshots from an interactive animation on Slate.com

The affect of the recession is dramatically illustrated in this example. In the first screenshot we see the job growth in 2006

In the second screen shot we see the job loss Oct 2008-Oct 2009

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Tax rates and Government Spending

by Catherine Mulbrandon

in Comparing Tax Rates by Income

Day 6 of 28 Days of Tax Data

From USA Today

There is a lot going on in this interactive graphic:

The main graph is plotting a single salary (in gray) but it is shown adjusted for inflation from 1940 to 2008.
The colored areas represent the amount of tax appropriated each year to different parts of the federal budget.
The smaller graph shows the percent of income paid in federal taxes from 1940 to 2008

I have taken screenshots for three different incomes for comparison: $10,000 $100,000 and $1,000,000. You will notice that the percentage of the tax collected for Social Security is greater for the $10,000 income than for the two higher incomes. This is because the % of taxes collected from the Social Security tax is highest on the $10,000 income.

$10,000

$100,000

$1,000,000

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Visual Storytelling: Credit Crisis

by Catherine Mulbrandon

in Other

An interactive graphic from the Wall Street Journal, which takes the data for 6 key financial indicators and stacks them while rollover text annotates the main events of the crisis. Created by Andrew Garcia Phillips, Stephen Grocer and Kate Milani.

I think the visual display of the data is very effective however the rollover text annotations are not effective since you can’t use them to follow the underlining story in the data visualization.

While I appreciate Google Finance integrating the news story with the graphic which allows you to use the data visualization find related news stories you lose the different data series and there still is no coherent story for the graphic.