How to Make a Thematic Map

How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools | FlowingData

This is a great worked example of both scraping data and turning it into a nice visualization.

These are very important tools you should know.

Discuss: 1) Why learn Python when you could just type the data into a spreadsheet? 2) R does maps too. Which is better? 3) GIS? See Grass for an open source GIS system.

Picturing Unemployment

The Jobless Rate for People Like You - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com

The NYT did this very interesting interactive chart allowing you to see the unemployment rates for various combinations of race, sex, age and education (72 groups in all).

The Wall Street Journal also had an interesting look at unemployment since 1948, but apparently the graphic is no longer available at the WSJ site. Here is a post that features part of the static graphic and offers a few comments.

Discuss: 1) What else might the NYT chart offer as options? 2) Given the CPS data used by NYT, what else might you do to visualize unemployment? 3) The WSJ graph is unusual because it converts a timeseries into a rectangular grid. What is gained and lost by this?