Monday, May 26, 2008

In the Shadow of Foreclosures


Great graphic from NYTimes.com showing the subprime mortgage foreclosures as a percentage of all subprime mortgages by geographic region of the country.

4 comments:

  1. It is a very cool looking graphic. Makes for a great piece of art on the page. But I think the way they presented the data makes it hard to read. The pop up sections indicate the percentage of subprime mortgages in foreclosure but the size of the metropolitan areas -- even though it isn't intended to be part of the data -- distorts the values (one of the basic no-nos of chart building.) The shading in the denser parts of the chart makes it difficult to pick out the different shades of the pop ups. And the perspective makes it almost impossible to pick out which metropolitan area is represented by which pop up in the north-central and northeast.

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  2. The concept is good. It would be great for a 3D info-viz project. Adjust the colors as needed. Maybe it would work in Google Earth. A 3D fly-through would be interesting.

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  3. Good idea Lynn. A Google fly-through would be very interesting. In fact, an add-on to Google Maps or Google Earth that let you chart data on the map would be very useful.

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  4. I'll think about this. Maybe it can be done in Google Sketch-up.

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