One day in complaint

Hi there, it's Rose. I'm a writer at Datawrapper and today I'm appreciating a big list of (mostly) small problems.

The world is too big, and too full of detail, to take in all at once. So how can we ever hope to understand what happens in it?

Sometimes it works to zoom out — aggregate — generalize — lump. And sometimes it’s more fun to get small:

I started this Weekly Chart with a big, busy data set: the records of every request for service made through New York City’s 311 hotline from 2010 to today. That’s over 39.5 million interactions, with people reporting everything from potholes to illegal construction to “loud talking” neighbors to dead opossums.

If I were a city council member making next year’s transportation budget, or a journalist reporting on homelessness, or an activist taking up the fight against loud talking, then the best part of this quantity of data would be the way it allows me to knead 39.5 million separate events into a smooth, consistent texture, a general facts of the matter at hand.

But that’s not who I am today. I’m enjoying the jumbled, episodic stories in this data, and I want to bring out their individual qualities instead of smoothing them away. So I decided to map these calls, one by one — and that’s where I had to let my tools take the lead. Because to fit this in an interactive symbol map, I couldn’t take a year’s worth of calls (that would have been 3,534,262 rows of data), and I couldn’t take a month’s worth. I couldn’t even take an entire week. To get a perspective we can hold in one glance, I had to look at just one full day.

In fact, we could go in even closer and watch that day unfold:

And with that I’ll say good night as well — I hope your evening brings no cause for complaint.

Next week we’ll get a Weekly Chart from our visualization developer Ivan. See you then!