Clickable Context

Essential Workers And Subways

I produced this map to augment reporting I was doing around who essential workers were and how they were getting around during the early days of pandemic lockdowns. It’s a three-part illustration of the commutes of healthcare workers, in particular. From the often more highly-impoverished neighborhoods that essential workers call home, to the 90% empty subway stops that shuttle them to work, to the overwhelmed hospitals and ICUs that await them.

Visualizing Relationships

When the privileged catch a cold, marginalized communities catch the flu. It’s always, but especially in a crisis, worth looking at how different populations, grouped by physical space or demographic attributes, are impacted differently by the same social forces. Analyses like this confirmed anecdotal reports of COVID-19 hitting Black and Brown communities harder, and also began our hunt for the strongest correlation we could find. We found it in household size, which might not speak to racial inequalities, but does help understand a dynamic of the virus’s spread.

PRODUCER’S NOTE: The zoomed-out view is the most precise, but for a more conceptual experience of the graph, draw a zoom box all the way across the horizontal axis and from about 750 to 2,000 cases per thousand vertically. There, you can see a more cinematic view of how the virus has ravaged poor communities more than middle and upper middle class ones. With the bubbles rising up above the bounds of the zoom box, this view suggests a sinking motion, sinking into water. This viz helped me understand how data can often describe emotional truths, as well as the cold hard facts.

Where am I in all this?

This is perhaps the best question that interactives can answer. From a critical question — is the infection rate in my area too high to risk a trip to the store? — to a more trivial interest — are my neighbors practicing social distancing — map visualizations add new layers of understanding to the lived experiences of users.

The Latest

In a slowly unfolding crisis, daily datavis updates are a useful way to put the latest information front and center in a way that directly addresses the most pressing questions a user is likely to have. In these cases, they are: How rampant is the virus in my community? And how much worse or better in terms of “flattening the curve” is today than yesterday?

51 Council Members In 52 Weeks

In 2022, the Brian Lehrer Show sought to speak with all 51 members of the NY City Council, for a series of “get to know your representative” style-interviews. And we thought it would be a fun idea, and useful to our listeners, to produce a map of those interviews, which also include a “show and tell” item from each Council Member to celebrate their district.

Brian Lehrer’s “Shop Listener” Community Holiday Project

When it comes time to think about holiday spending, and gifting and spreading the seasonal dollars around, the Brian Lehrer Show does a series of call-ins for local businesses to give themselves a shoutout on the air, to encourage a sense that our listening community is one that supports each other. When I joined the team, we began to look for ways to turn those on-air experiences into a handy-dandy gift guide that could live online in perpetuity, which we figured would be more useful for shoppers, and more helpful to businesses. This project includes a map, for those looking to “shop local,” as well as a searchable list.

Visualizing Legal Gun Ownership

I made a pair of interactives to accompany a story about legal pistol owners on Long Island. This was part of an award-winning series on guns the Long Island Herald launched in the wake of the Parkland shooting. The interactives works with the other elements of the story — an interview with police about the licensing process, and a profile of a local gun owner — to paint a picture of legal gun ownership in Nassau County.