I always wondered how much those swing states actually swing. So I looked at the results of presidential elections over the last 100 years, and it's not easy to determine which states actually are swing states from just looking at their history. Rather, there seems to be a pattern of relative stability for a few election cycles, and then big, sweeping wins for one side.

A few days ago, I looked at how the electoral college system amplifies the lead of the strongest candidate in a US presidential election. The way I made the chart (with the help of PhotoShop) created some interesting reactions, and finally led me to what I consider the best way to do it (using stacked bar charts). I also want to respond to a few comments about the kind of chart used and why I think it is the most effective way to show what it does.

What a difference 22 years make! In 1986, George Furnas published his paper, Generalized Fisheye Views, which described what was to become one of the first (and most prominent) focus+context techniques. One of the examples he used was a calendar that showed the current day in most detail, with less space for the surrounding ones. Yahoo! just started an opt-in beta of their new calendar that uses the same idea.

The Electoral College is a key aspect of the US presidential elections. Its mechanics and distribution of electors are crucial for presidential campaigns and determine the so-called battleground states – and possibly also distort the will of the people. I was interested this last effect, so I did a little analysis.

Images speak louder than words. A lot louder. It would be hard to find a more vivid and impressive visualization of what happened today on the New York Stock Exchange.

SPSS recently released their new Viz Designer, a visualization engine built on Leland Wilkinson's work (The Grammar of Graphics and nViZn). The comparison with Tableau is unavoidable since both are based on the same underlying ideas. Right now, Viz Designer does not look good in that comparison. 

The EagerEyes Labs' mission is to provide tools to gain insight into relevant data to everybody. As part of that, the plan has always been to release the source code. The first piece of code is now published, and more is coming.