Job Loss: The Power of Animation

Aleks Jakulin:

Slate has a beautiful animated rendering of the job gains/losses over the past 2 years. It would be very difficult to show the trends without animation.

Two other things I like: The quantity circles are so much more informative than using color to paint states: we all know that most job losses are in NY and CA, because they're the biggest! Those circles help control for state population density.

The animation helps control for job gains in the previous period: it hides the cities that are relatively stable, but it nicely shows boom-bust cities (NYC) and stagnation-bust cities (Detroit).

(Via Peter's Twitter.)