The Daily Illini is the independent, student-run newspaper at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is an online-first publication with a print edition published each Wednesday.
Writers and editors use a Google Form to request the production of editorial illustrations and data visualizations to accompany specific stories. The design staff is able to view and accept the requests via a Google Sheet spreadsheet as availability permits.
The data visualization requests include basic information about the story, the copy to be included, the raw data and the desired direction. The produced work is submitted to the design editor for review.
The writer requested a data visualization for a story about Illinois’ new congressional map signed into law by Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Nov. 23, 2021. He provided images of the old and new maps, as well as the following description:
“A comparison of the new congressional map with the old one, or maybe an overlay that shows the new divisions”
Prior to working on this assignment, my workflow for designing maps involved searching online for PDF files containing the necessary boundaries in vector format and painstakingly cleaning up the layers and shapes using Adobe Illustrator.
There had to be a more efficient way to work with data and maps — I was sure. How do industry professionals do it?
GEOlayers 3 is a plugin for animating maps using Adobe After Effects. It was featured in a video from the Vox YouTube channel discussing the staff’s most-used tools and resources.
The equivalent software for Illustrator is Esri’s ArcGIS Maps for Adobe Creative Cloud plugin. ArcGIS Pro is the industry-standard geographic information system mapping software. QGIS is an open-source alternative to ArcGIS Pro that does not have a plugin for Illustrator.
The redistricting office of the Illinois General Assembly published interactive maps for the old and new congressional districts using Google’s My Maps feature. The feature allows users to duplicate and download published maps as KML files — a GIS file format compatible with ArcGIS and QGIS.
The redistricting office of the Illinois General Assembly published interactive maps for the old and new congressional districts using Google’s My Maps feature. The feature allows users to duplicate and download published maps as KML files — a GIS file format compatible with ArcGIS and QGIS.
The Google map for the new congressional districts was linked as a source for the Illinois page of FiveThirtyEight’s “What Redistricting Looks Like In Every State” project.
The interactive maps featured only three cities: Chicago, Rockford and Springfield. These three cities do not provide enough information for readers to make sense of where the district boundaries lie.
The writer requested a data visualization for a story about the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant shortly after it was first discovered. The data was obtained from a CNN article listing the number of cases reported in each country as of December 1, 2021. The writer categorized the data further by continent.
The data is categorical. A bar chart would be an acceptable way to visualize the data, but the large spread of the data set would result in a lot of empty space. The writer aggregated the data by continent, but a bar chart would provide no geographic context.
The data was provided in the format country: # "cases", for example: “Australia: 7 cases.” It was necessary to separate the data into columns for the country and the number of cases using the=LEFT(), =MID(), and =FIND() functions within Microsoft Excel.
