Sometimes an interactive isn’t the right approach. I’ve recently been very interested in motion graphic videos. They can communicate complex ideas in a very engaging way. Plus they can look great too. I made this in Motion 5. Watch the full video

One of the greatest developments for me lately was the introduction of Politics Insider, the Globe’s new subscriber-only blog on national politics run by online politics editor Chris Hannay. I was invited to contribute every Wednesday, using data to give a new perspective on national affairs. I was surprised to see my name in an ad for the project. It’s a real honour appear beside the likes of André Picard and Konrad Yakabuski. I’m an ant among giants.  

I made an interactive for this last year, which was nominated for a Data Journalism Award. That one took a few weeks of dabbling. I made this one in a single night after putting it off for far too long. The end product used the Fusion Tables API to dynamically query the data from the dataset. I really wish we could easily create our own database installs with PHP, but the FTAPI worked quite well. It definitely has the highest  traffic and most engagement of any interactive I’ve made. This has less to do with the content and everything to do with it leading the home page for several hours that day. Promotion = traffic. No promotion = no traffic. Simple as that. View the entire interactive

What a fun project this was. I contacted MLB to see if they had any data on R.A. Dickey, the Jays’ new knuckleball pitcher. Did they? Ha! They have reams of data. In a spreadsheet. And they’ll email it to me right away. And answer questions promptly. The exact opposite of almost every government source I’ve ever reached in Canada. The beauty of working with professionals. The data had a multitude of columns, from batter name to pitch type to result and speed. But the most interesting potential came from the coordinates: it tracks where the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand and where it crosses the plate. Enough to reconstruct every pitch. I started working on a Raphael interactive (naturally — Raphael is the very best interactive engine in the market today in my opinion… yes, better than D3!). I designed an entire top-down version that tracked the ball’s movement from [...]

This project took about a year. Really. Because we had to collect the data from a dozen sources in between other projects that kept demanding our time. But we finally got it out and it was a huge success. The incredible Rob Carrick wrote a great column to accompany the interactive. It looks at how young people today have it much worse than a generation ago. This is old hat to some people, but it’s never been dealt with so objectively before. We finally dug deep across several metrics to identify the trends. View the full interactive

The Globe investigative team uncovered these connections between the OLG and other major casino players like MGM. We used this flowchart online to illustrate the connections. View the full interactive

We scraped data on Canada’s Main Estimates to create this interactive chart, showing how much things changed year-to-year. Explore the full interactive

I adapted this print graphic into an online interactive flow chart. Choose what type of investor you are and find custom advice. View the full interactive

As part of The Globe’s new series “Reinventing Parliament,” we decided to investigate how often Members of Parliament voted against the majority of their party. The undertaking took weeks of number crunching, programming and visualizing to put together. The end product shows a clear trend: MPs rarely break ranks, with most voting along party lines more than 97 per cent of the time. But Conservative MPs are overwhelmingly more likely to break rank than members from other parties. The project began by scraping 600 pages of parliamentary voting data. We designed a scraper in Python that trudged through these pages, scraping the MP’s name, party, riding and vote. All told, we had 162,280 votes between June 2, 2011 and Jan. 28, 2013. The next step was determining whether the MP voted with or against their party. We first believed we could check this against the whip’s vote. But we ran into [...]

An open letter to all interested parties: It has come to my attention that the University Students’ Council is planning to move the Gazette and its 24 editors from its 40-year location to a much smaller office currently occupied by four people. As I understand, this plan was made surreptitiously without due consultation with the Gazette, its staff, or even multi-faith stakeholders at the centre of the issue. As former editor-in-chief of the Gazette, I have many grave concerns about this plan, not least of which is the Gazette’s ability to function as a key part of campus democracy, should this plan proceed. The publisher-newspaper relationship is a tenuous one, to be sure. As such, it’s always prudent on the publisher to be as open, transparent and accountable as possible so political influences and personal vendettas are not allowed to interfere with the newspaper’s autonomy and freedom. The decision to [...]

My latest interactive breaks down donations to Ontario Liberal candidates. It includes a bar chart (below), some pie charts and a searchable table. See the full interactive

I’m pleased to say my co-workers have nominated me as an “innovator” for the annual Globey awards. The cross-company awards give employees a chance to recognize their peers as either “innovators” or “team players.” I was nominated alongside three very creative folks in a very large pool of editorial workers. A big thanks to everyone who nominated me. It’s an honour to be recognized!

An employee of Huffington Post Canada posted this photo on Facebook a few days ago. The chart apparently shows how the Huffington Post Canada has more “unique views” than any other national newspaper, including The Globe (full disclosure: I work at The Globe). Original caption: BEST NEWS OF THE DAY: The Huffington Post Canada is now bigger (in terms of audience for an online national newspaper) than The Globe and Mail, National Post and the Toronto Star. go team! Is that possible? Is “The Huffington Post Canada” actually “bigger” than Canada’s biggest newspapers? Something tells me no. So let’s have a factual look at HuffPoCa’s traffic. Canadian rankings Based on publicly-available Alexa rankings, here are Canada’s largest newspapers ranked alongside Huffington Post Canada. #32 – The Globe and Mail #52 – The Toronto Star #120 – The National Post #173 – The Huffington Post Canada That gives a fair indication of HuffPoCa’s [...]

I came up with an idea to show videos and annotations side-by-side for the U.S. presidential debates. While I was making the thing, I discovered YouTube has an API. And it’s pretty neat. You can trigger different events and so on. We decided to write about specific moments in the video and link to them, so you could watch the moment you’re reading about. The idea is weeks old but, unfortunately, the NYtimes published their version a day earlier than us. Check out the full version.

This was made very quickly for the 2011 census release on family. We sort of forgot it was happening and realized only a few days earlier. I could have done something simple… but decided to try a new kind of data interactive for the Globe: a customizable infographic narrative with dynamic charts. Check it out here.