Archive for May 2010
Opportunities for Course Promotion No. 237: Delicious
This just occurred to me, as I was using delicious to collect and feed resources into the Digital Worlds course…
That is, make use of the tag description… :-)
Playing With Processing – arc() and General Election Data, 2005
Over the weekend, I thought I’d have a little bit more of a play with the data I got into shape in Data Handling in Action – Visualising UK General Election 2005 Results. One of the thing’s I’ve been pondering with in Processing is how to draw circles and arcs, so having discovered the arc() formula, I decided to have a little play with it…
[UPDATE - there maybe a minor oops or two in some of the following images... e.g. scaling (proportion of vote cast vs size of constituency may be mangled in a one of charts; and if neither of lib/lab/con won a seat, votes may still show (in order of most-least from among the big three)... But having doodled, now I know the sorts of things I want to measure and plot for doing it properly next time!;-)]
Here we have the 2005 general election results for each constituency for Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservative party. Each concentric circle is one constituency, in alphabetical order, going from inside to out. The colours are as you might expect, the length of an arc is the percentage of the overall vote in that constituency polled by the corresponding party. The six plots show all the possible orderings…
It strikes me that I assumed the origin that the arc() function takes… Maybe I should set it more deliberately (but according to what criterion?)
I also experimented with a range of plots based in equal segments, with origin axes 120 degrees apart. Visualisation folk won’t like these because the whole circle does not add up 100% of anything…
Here, each party has 120 degrees; the length of each arc is the percentage of valid votes * 120 degrees… (I think… pretty sure it’s not percentage of possible electorate!)
In the following case, the 120 degree angle about each party is 100% of the eligible voters; the arc length is: 120 degrees * number of votes / number of eligible voters.
If we just look at winners, the following allocates 120 degrees to the votes cast in the constituency; arcs show number of votes for winner / number of valid votes cast (err, maybe… unless it’s per size of consituency… hmmm):
The next chart shows the size of the majority, as a percentage of the whole circle:
Finally, here’s just the winning party as a whole ring:
UPDATE: and here’s a view showing the percentage votes in order (winner first, second placed candidate, then third, again from just taking into account the three main parties… and ah, I’ve maybe realised an oops for constituencies where one of the three main parties doesn’t win….maybe their votrs are showing too…?! Hmm……)
If I had any more time to play on these, I’d look at ordering the circles in various different ways. But I don’t have any more time to play on this just now…
PS For more election related data, particulalry in Linked Data from, see @kitwallace’s Election nominations in the Talis Data Incubator and An exercise in RDF – 2005 Election data.
PPS see also this summary/round-up of UK media interactive swingometers
UK General Election 2010 – Interactive Maps and Swingometers
So it seems like the General Election has been a Good Thing for the news media’s interactive developer teams… Here’s a quick round up of some of the interactives I’ve found…
First up, the BBC’s interactive election seat calculator:
This lets you set the percentage vote polled by each party and it will try to predict the outcome…
The Guardian swingometer lets you play with swing from any two of the three big parties to the third:
The Daily Telegraph swingometer lets you look at swing between any two parties…
The Economist also lets you explore pairwise swings…
The Times doesn’t really let you do much at all… and I wonder – is Ladbrokes in there as product placement?!
Sky doesn’t go in for modeling or prediction, it’s more of just a constituency browser…
The Sun probably has Tiffany, 23…
From elsewhere, this swingometer from the Charts & numbers – UK Election 2010 blog lets you model swings between the various parties…
As to what swing is? It’s defined in this Parliamentary briefing doc [PDF]/
