The New York Times created an interactive data visualization, Connecting the Dots Behind the 2016 Presidential Candidates , to help readers understand the people behind the candidates in the 2016 presidential election. The introduction explains that although the candidates change, often the people behind the campaigns do not. Visualizing data in this way, allows the reader to get a comprehensive look at who is where and where they have been in the past. The visualization begins with Hillary Rodham Clinton who by far has the most connections. Her network is broken into Clinton loyalists, Obama operative, pro-Clinton super PAC, and other key strategists.

Viewers can hover over circles to highlight the connections or see who belongs to which group by selecting a box at the top of her visualization.

The caption explains that the size of the circle is proportional to the number of people in each group. Campaigns are darker and administrations along with other organizations are lighter.

The interactive’s way of visualizing data allows the reader to make connections, literally, that they may not have made otherwise. Besides Hillary Clinton, candidates include Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker. The New York Times has several other ways of visualizing data regarding the election including information on candidates’ backgrounds, who is running verse who is not, and who has the campaign money.

Periscopic , a data visualization tool firm, created A World of Terror to explore the extent of terrorism around the world. Data was compiled from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and Global Terrorism Database (GTD) records ranging from 1970 to 2013. The interactive data visualization tool allows users to view 25 terrorist groups’ actions by five categories including longest active, recent activity, most victims, geographic spread and by the name of the group. The reader can also choose incidents that have been verified for the 25 groups or see all the incidents credited to a group even if not verified by authorities.

By hovering over a group, the reader will see the numbers of incidents that group has been involved with as well as the total number wounded or killed as a result of those incidents. The data visualization tool also includes a chart which represents the number of incidents and when they occurred as well as how many were killed or wounded. A map located above the chart allows the viewer to see which countries the acts of terrorism took place. By clicking on the map, readers can review a brief background of the group.

Al-Qa’ida and Taliban are two of twenty five groups listed in A World of Terror interactive data visualization tool.

The data analytics are summarized in a Sources and Methods link in the bottom left of the page. A brief analysis of the data is broken into the geography, years, wounded, and killed on the bottom right. Basically, the analysis states that the 25 groups selected out of 3,065 listed in the GTD are responsible for 48 % of the wounded and 56% of those killed in terrorist attacks in 73 countries.

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In this post, I bring you data visualization examples which I created for an article focused on international politics published by Forbes .  I developed graphs using a data analytics software Tableau which comes with powerful visualization tools. The goal of the article was to draw a distinction between the European Union (EU) and Russia led Eurasian Customs Union (ECU) in terms of economic might, level of corruption and government effectiveness, and overall freedom. The following chart shows a series of rank ordered bars corresponding to the countries comprising the EU and the ECU in terms of economic freedom. This data visualization not only shows comparative freedom of each country, but also highlights categories where each country falls. The data source is the Index of Economic Freedom by Heritage Foundation.

The next chart represents a dual axes scatterplot with countries plotted based on the level of corruption and government effectiveness. The source for this data is Worldwide Governance Indicators by the World Bank.

The final chart is yet another example of how visualization tools provide means to plot complex information on a single viz. This graph is divided in three parts: countries, freedom status and ranking of political and civil liberties for each country. The last part is interesting as it includes several categories which had to be added to this data visualization piece without overwhelming it. I achieved this by using an array of micro pie charts. The data for this data viz came from Freedom in the World Report by Freedom House.