Visualizing politics
Posted: Wednesday, October 15, 2008 6:35 PM by Alan Boyle
The Takeaway / WNYC
An online tracker offered by "The Takeaway" radio show's Web site aggregates
electoral-vote projections from 15 media outlets. Click on the image to learn more.
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Remember the good old days, way back in 2000, when NBC's Tim Russert showed how important "Florida! Florida! Florida!" was by scribbling on a whiteboard with a marker pen? That whiteboard is now sitting in a museum - the Smithsonian, in fact - and computer wizards are serving up a whole new set of tools for visualizing politics.
Visualizations can cut through the myriad opinion polls to show you where Republican presidential candidate John McCain and Democratic rival Barack Obama stand in the only poll that matters - and which states could be as important this year as Florida was in 2000.
For online users who aren't content with one source for their political prognostication, "The Takeaway" radio show offers an electoral-vote tracker that combines predictions from 15 media organizations, ranging from Fox News to the FiveThirtyEight blog. The squares for each state are proportional to the vote count, and the placement of states in the toss-up section could lead you to conclude this is the year of "Virginia! Colorado! Florida!"
Many Eyes / IBM Research |
This bubble graphic shows relative amounts of
federal earmarks per capita in 2008 by state. The
bigger the circle, the higher the amount.
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That's just one illustration showing how visualizations can go beyond the numbers. Computer programs can also turn budget data into cute bubbles to show where all those nasty earmarks are going (I can see Alaska from here), and use big type to indicate which words the candidates used most often during the last presidential debate (for Obama, it was "McCain," and for McCain, it was "Obama").
"We've seen a real surge of interest in visualizations relating to politics," Martin Wattenberg, group manager for IBM's Visual Communication Lab, told me today. "After every presidential and vice-presidential debate so far, we immediately see people uploading transcripts and applying different visualizations to get different views."
IBM's lab lets contributors use their own charting methods to create pictures that capture the essence of a gnarly data set. But that's not the end of the process. Each graphic is accompanied by a discussion forum that allows other users to comment. After a visualization was posted comparing the size of a financial bailout to other federal spending, the discussion focused on whether the raw numbers told the whole story.
"It's interesting," Wattenberg said. "I feel as if visualizations often don't bring you to a conclusion, but end up starting a conversation and moving that conversation forward."
Tapping into social networking
There are even tools to visualize how the political chatter is shaping up: In addition to laying out the electoral maps, a relatively new Web site called Perspctv uses Venn diagrams to compare how often Obama, McCain and their running mates are mentioned in the news media, in the blogosphere and in short-form tweets on the Twitter network.
"Generally, on a given day, the news mentions have the most overlap, followed by the blogosphere mentions," Perspctv founder Vineet Choudhary told me. "On Twitter, it's generally the least amount of overlap."
The tweets flip through Perspctv's home page like a stock ticker of social networking. "A lot more people seem to be tuning in," Choudhary said. "It's handy to have an easy, quick consumption mechanism."
You'll also find stats on Web traffic to the McCain and Obama Web sites, as well as Google search volume (both of which currently favor the Democrat). Choudhary said he plans to broaden his Perspctv after the election and offer Web tools that can "analyze social media on any topic."
"I do have other things going on," he said. "However, this has definitely made me more of a political junkie."
A doughnut of data
Yet another visualization tool, developed by University of Utah computer scientists, lets users slice survey results into smaller demographic pieces. For example, the software can take a data set about political preferences and easily show you how the statistics break down for female voters, or black female voters, or black female voters with an income over $50,000.
The software is called Simple Query Interface With a Radial Layout, or SQIRL ("squirrel") for short. Utah researcher Geoff Draper devised the new method as part of his Ph.D. thesis, and will be presenting his study this weekend at IEEE Visualization 2008 in Columbus, Ohio.
"I wanted to create a way to make it easy for the masses to analyze data," Draper said in a news release about SQIRL.
The software displays data distributions in a doughnut shape. To recalculate the breakdown for a particular demographic group, you simply drag the label for that group into the center of the doughnut. Drag in more labels, and you come up with a more highly segmented subset of the sampling group. A QuickTime video demonstrates how the software works.
"Right now, it is an academic project," Draper said. "My goal is to get the idea out there and let other software developers incorporate our visual methods into their products. The software would be useful for news reporters to go on the air and move the icons around and show how different demographic groups voted, how they feel about certain issues."
The pundits who follow in Tim Russert's big footsteps will no doubt find themselves juggling Twitter tweets, online SQIRLs and other high-tech politicometers instead of whiteboards. Where do you turn when you need a quick visual on the political race? (Other than our own Politics Dashboard, of course!) Feel free to pass along your favorite Web sites in a comment below.
I want to give a big Tip o' the Log to ReadWriteWeb for Sarah Perez's posting on "5 Ways to Visualize the U.S. Elections." If you follow the links from that item, you'll eventually arrive at Pointy Haired Dilbert's posting on "Red vs. Blue: 35 Cool Visualizations on 2008 U.S. Presidential Election."
Update for 7:55 p.m. ET: Because this is a debate night, I'll provide tonight's pre-debate political prediction market quotes, and then update this item with the post-debate numbers. Right now, the good news for McCain is that the steep drop in his share price has stabilized and even shows signs of an upturn. Here are the winner-take-all quotes, translated so that they fit a 1-to-100 probability scale. Thus, a figure of 83.2 means the market sees an 83.2 percent probability that a particular candidate will be elected president:
- Betfair: 84.7 for Obama, 14.7 for McCain (quoted odds, 7:30 p.m.).
- Inkling Markets: 90.06 for Obama, 9.93 for McCain (listed prices).
- InTrade: 80 for Obama, 21.1 for McCain (closing prices).
- Iowa Elec. Markets: 83.2 for Obama, 18 for McCain (7:30 average).
- NewsFutures: 77 for Obama, 23 for McCain (prices at 7:55 p.m.).
Update for 1:55 p.m. ET Oct. 16: McCain share prices have fallen:
- Betfair: 87 for Obama, 12.8 for McCain.
- Inkling Markets: 95.4 for Obama, 4.59 for McCain.
- InTrade: 82.6 for Obama, 17.6 for McCain (closing prices).
- Iowa Elec. Markets: 85 for Obama, 15.2 for McCain (1:45 average).
- NewsFutures: 80 for Obama, 20 for McCain (prices at 1:55 p.m.)
