I used a story that I found on NYT’s Upshot vertical to examine how the story uses the principles that we read about. This story written by Josh Katz is examining who will win the election in November.
Tuft said these were the fundamental principles of analytical design:
- Should compare something
- Causality, mechanisms, structure, explanation
- Multivariate
- Integration of evidence
- Documentation
- Content matters most
By going down the list, lets look at this article… This article is comparing Hilary Clinton vs. Donald Trump and looking at different ways to come to an overall statement that they believe Clinton has an 83% chance of winning. They’re also comparing different charts and different ways to calculate this by looking at how states normally vote, how other sites post election predictions, different outcomes that could happen due to electoral votes, etc.
This story has structure and the infographics are explained well but the reasoning behind the statistics isn’t. That would change the whole purpose of this piece if everything in the political sphere was explained. This piece is multivariate (more than three variables), as mentioned before it looks at Clinton winning by state in different aspects. Evidence is present and as is documentation.
The most important is content. The graphics are visually appealing, but also easy to understand – this was an important made in last article we had to read for this assingment. I really like the interactive graphic at the end, showing how difficult it will be for Trump to win.