FiveThirtyEight is a website very near and dear to my heart. Headed by the statistics Wunderkind, Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight is a data-driven news site dedicated to elucidating elections, sports, and other minutiae of daily life. This week, I’d like to focus on the interface regarding FiveThirtyEight’s election interactives. Unlike Politico’s nigh-unnavigtable election statistics and CNN’s gimmicky “horserace” type, I find FiveThirtyEight’s interactives to be the perfect marriage between interactivity and accessiblility.
For instance, on the linked page, one can see, in clearly defined and dileniated charts, how close the race is between Republican candidates. Further, I find that people tend to focus on popular vote as barometers of electoral competitiveness rather than delegate count. FiveThirtyEight, rather, focuses the attention almost entirely on the delegate count, showing a dynamic “target” that each candidate must reach in order to emerge from the primary contest victorious. Further, by scrolling over the x-axis of the target tracker, one gets a sense of the dynamism of the contest, as it gives an overview of almost all contest. From this, one can ascertain the work that goes into entry, coding, and plotting of data; this brings data “to life” as it were, showing that data is not a neutral category but the presentation of a healthy marriage of good aesthetic sensibilities and social scientific rigor.
