Visualizing Election Uncertainty
A Project to Analyze, Summarize, and Share Best Practices
for Visualizing an Unprecedented Election
Our top data visualization wrangler, EJ Fox is now working on a highly relevant and timely effort to gather insights on how to best visualize election data. Longer term, this is part of our data analytics and reporting subsystem work of ElectOS called VoteStream. EJ is focused on how different newsrooms are preparing to visualize uncertainty (e.g., uncounted ballots and more) for the 2020 election.
Up to this point, we’ve written elsewhere about the latest technology and process issues emerging in competitive states, with weekly updates. And we’ve written extensively about:
specific technology and process concerns in competitive states;
ballot administration procedures for competitive states; and
…as we race toward the conclusion of this 2020 voting season. Now, we want to address how to best visualize all of this, and specifically data about the progress of the election itself.
So, we’re exploring how all of this information about election uncertainty is and can be visualized and reduced to simple explanation.
The OSET Institute believes data visualization is a key component to all of this, and election season is the prime time of application because there is so much data to be analyzed, explored, and (hopefully) explained. And EJ is the person to do this (with some impressive work including data visualization work with NBC News who we collaborate with on Vote Watch), bringing extensive newsroom experience from NBC Universal and elsewhere where this has been and continues to be his wheelhouse.
But EJ is not alone; besides the OSET Team, he is also collaborating with some other experts, whom we’ll introduce soon as this progresses.
So we think the best way to start than to gather and summarize best practices and approaches across industries and disciplines. We hope to find a breadth of solutions that can be shared, discussed, and reused. To do so, we’ve prepared a brief open survey for media professionals, academic researchers, and others interested and working in election data analysis. EJ is focusing primarily on newsrooms, but the survey is open to anyone who is working with public-facing election visualization.
As standard with our open source mandate, responses will be edited for readability (there are some narrative free-form text answers requested in addition to structured data), then summarized, and shared publicly.
And If a survey participant wishes for some reason to remain anonymous, we will accommodate.
You can find the survey here.
Let’s do this.
