Hi.

Data Visualization

• Building Toward Disaster

  

  This Seattle Times interactive was designed to let readers explore more than 80 years of history leading up to the 2014 Oso landslide that killed 43 people. Reporters gathered 13 aerial photos dating back to 1933, as well as data on all of the houses, logging, red flags, and attempted fixes for the hill. I arranged the timeline vertically, which makes it easier to scroll on desktop and mobile, and linked its progress to the photos so that readers could flip through them and watch the river gradually eat away at the base of the hill.

• Top Northwest Companies

  

  Each year, the Seattle Times ranks the top companies native to the Pacific Northwest, according to various performance metrics. As one of my first projects at the paper, I helped assemble this package, which combined a custom fullscreen parallax (to showcase impressive work by our photographer) and a sortable, filtered table built in AngularJS.

• Against the Grain

  

  In this project, the CQ newsroom wanted to understand legislators who vote against the party line--why do they go "against the grain?" What kinds of votes garner the most dissent? To let people browse through our database of party unity votes, we built this web application in object-oriented Javascript and HTML. As readers move through the data, new panels will open to the right, but they can return to an earlier fork in their search at any time. This interactive was a powerful experiment, not just as a standalone interactive, but also as an exploration of new UI for CQ's extensive (but cumbersome) vote database.

• Who Owns the Debt?

  

  As the debt limit debate neared its deadline, my team at CQ produced several graphics on the history of the debate, past attempts to raise the limit, and the composition of the debt in question. In this interactive, built in HTML/JavaScript, we pulled apart the components of the debt to see just what was owed to whom. It was featured, along with its companion, on the front page of the Economist's web site.

• Demography is Destiny

  

  As we got better at interactive design, the CQ multimedia team moved to a hybrid approach: using Flash for complicated, cross-browser visuals, while using HTML for everything else. We communicated between the two using ActionScript's ExternalInterface, giving us the best of both worlds. One great example of this approach is our map of age demographics over the past decade, based on a selection of census data. The map is built in Flash for its powerful vector graphics, but clicking on a state transfers data out to be presented in an HTML dialog using our custom JavaScript template functions and jQueryUI.

• CQ Economy Tracker

  

  The Economy Tracker was a flagship multimedia production for CQ: an interactive data visualization of more than 40 years of economic data at the national, regional, and state levels, split into 6 indicator sets. Behind the scenes, it communicates with our PostgreSQL database via a custom PHP server, which also allows reporters to easily upload CSV files for data updating. The server scripts expose a simple REST/JSON API, creating a base for other economic data visualizations and mashups, such as this map of post-recession unemployment.

• CQ Vote Studies

  

  Each year, CQ does an elaborate vote study for all 535 members of Congress, resulting in scores for their party unity (how often they voted with the leadership) and presidential support (how often they voted with the president's pre-announced positions). These are published in the weekly magazine, and in 2009 they accompanied an article on the rising influence of moderates. For the online audience, I created an interactive component to accompany the story online, allowing readers to explore the data in both tabular and rich graphical format. At the end of 2010, I updated the visualization to be faster, and to support multiple years of data on the same canvas. The most recent version adds data going back to 2002, and provides a more convenient, multi-axis visualization of each year.