Comments on: Presidential Demographics

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:47:42 +0000

Tim – I like that too. I’ve thought of a couple other ways to deal with it, but I suspect neither is any better than Robert’s.

By: tim

tim — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:33:24 +0000

I like it because it has to deal with the anomaly of the non-consecutive term.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 21:12:11 +0000

Robert -

The interactivity, both in highlighting a particular president and in changing the view, is what makes the chart interesting.

I would like to get my hands on the data (I had visions of mousing over each president, and entering the data into a worksheet).

By: Robert Kosara

Robert Kosara — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 19:05:37 +0000

I’m glad you like it! I actually prototyped this in the OpenOffice spreadsheet when I first collected the data some time ago. It’s fairly easy to produce these three graphs with a few additional columns and stacked bar charts. I can send you the file, if you are interested. I’m also going to post the Java source code including the data file (which only contains name, date of birth, death, ascension, and end of term in a simple CSV file) soon.

The reason for making it interactive was to make it easier to compare, especially length of term and ascension age. Plus, it’s more engaging and fun, so people might be compelled to spend more time with it.