In Presidential Demographics, Part II, Robert Kosara has posted a very nice interactive infographic that allows you to answer a host of questions about US presidents:
Would McCain be the oldest US President? Would Obama be the youngest? Who was the youngest president? Were presidents younger in the past or older? What is the highest number of years a former president lived after leaving office? Who served the longest? Whose term was the shortest?
The chart lets you view presidents lifetimes and terms in office on a regular timeline, aligned by birth, or aligned by start of time in office. When you mouse over a bar, a pop-up displays the president’s name, date of birth and death, and dates in office. Here are a few screenshots.
I found this graphic very interesting, and I even learned a couple things. For example, I knew JFK was the youngest president ever to take office, until this chart showed me that Teddy Roosevelt actually held this honor. If I get ambitious, I may try to replicate this graphic in Excel.
Robert Kosara says
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.
Jon Peltier says
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).
tim says
I like it because it has to deal with the anomaly of the non-consecutive term.
Jon Peltier says
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.