

How We Built USA Today's Election Night Maps - willwhite
http://mapbox.com/blog/election-mapping-usatoday/

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jawns
I've worked on real-time displays of election results data in a newsroom
setting, so I know how much planning goes into something like this. This looks
great!

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porterhaney
This is a great write-up.

I love seeing your thought process on how you tackled the project. The bonus
playback of realtime results and the not preloading county data are two very
good examples of problems that need solving when you take on a project like
this. Super write up.

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dfan
I really like that map with overlaid discs representing the number of EV for
each state. I think it's much clearer than the usual method of distorting the
map to make each state's area proportional to its number of EV.

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mapster
"each state's area proportional to its number" = that class of map is called a
cartogram

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webXL
<http://www.usatoday.com/election-2012/results/>

Broken here. Chrome and FF.

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danso
I learned about this: R2D3:

> _Since it doesn’t get bogged down with supporting legacy browsers without
> SVG support, we switched over to R2D3 for versions of Internet Explorer less
> than IE9._ <https://github.com/mhemesath/r2d3/>

It's that easy to provide IE support for D3?

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dhcole1
IE9 works well with D3 without any work. For IE < 9, generally it was pretty
easy, though we had to do a few extra things we needed to work around:

1\. remove the use of SVG groups which are not supported in VML (though I
think r2d3 has had a recent update with some level of group support) 2\. Avoid
selecting features paths by class (e.g. us d3.select('path') instead of
d3.select('path.state') Class selectors just wouldn't work for us. 3\. for
performance, we used only the most simplified geographic data in IE < 9 4) 4\.
Avoid using d3.mouse for mouse location. Didn't work right in IE

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gagabity
How long did it take? Any idea how much the AP data feed costs?

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rhizome
I was hoping for some code listings.

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dhcole1
Sure, what are you looking for?

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rhizome
Less narrative, I guess, but I think that's just a different preference of
meaning for "how."

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wpietri
Personally, I loved the narrative. Which I mention not to suggest you
shouldn't want something else, but so that the authors know that people liked
it as is.

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daybowbow
I also found the narrative really helpful. We run some similar products around
maps, it was interesting to see how they approached this!

