Us Americans have been through an interesting few weeks. We had the Kavanaugh hearings that put a focus on the women in the Senate, so when Stephen Pelkofer recommended his viz for a makeover, we thought the timing was right. The community seems to enjoy topical data set.

What works well?

What could be improved?

What I did

Unless you've been living under a rock, you will know that there was a Presidential election on November 8th. Confusing everyone was the fact that Donald Trump won the electoral vote, yet Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. This made me think, how does the Electoral College work and does it accurately represent the people?

This turned out to be a fantastic civic learning experience for me. And exploring the data with Tableau helped me understand how it all works. I know a lot of people, particularly those I work with in the U.K., that are confused by this election and how the popular candidate didn't win. To aid in this understanding, I've created this story points visualisation to explain how the electoral college works, how electoral votes are allocated, and how the election would have turned out if the electoral college was based strictly on population.

As a second take on the Makeover Monday topic this week of what legislators spoke about after the Orlando mass shooting, I thought a better view might be the proportion of representatives who spoke about each topic. Presenting the data this way help provide better context for the overall picture while allowing you to compare both across the parties and within a party.

I think a donut chart works well here because we only have two parts to each donut and the number call out the amount that’s of interest. In addition, this enabled me to design a static visualisation that doesn’t require interactivity. For me, it’s much hard to design static, mobile-friendly visualisations than any other type at the moment.

This week’s Makeover Monday is a bit of a dark topic that gives us a glimmer into the how politicians in the US respond to a tragedy. Yes, this is a single mass shooting, but they occur nearly every day in America and the responses from politicians are now all too standard. The Orlando mass shooting likely got more attention because it happened at a LGBT club. This and other tragedies beg the question: When will America get its act together?

The chart that we’re reviewing this week is by the grapics team at The Washington Post.

What works well?

• It’s neatly organised in a 3x3 grid.
• The semi-circles are all sized relative to each other.
• It’s very easy to understand.
• They used colors that are automatically associated with the two political parties
• Everything is clearly labeled.
• It’s not over-cluttered.

What could be improved?

• The chart implies that there are equal representatives in both parties. However, Republicans have 247 seats while Democrats have 187.
  
• Using semi-circles makes the shapes hard to compare.
  
• It's difficult to compare across the topics.
  
• There should be an easier way to which party talks more about each topic
  

Given these changes I would like to see, I’ve create this version that shows how many representatives talked about each topic in a tornado chart format. I then included a circle with a number inside to show which party talked about the topic more and by how many representatives. Lastly, I added lots of summary details in the tooltips.