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Tuesday, August 11, 2009
When Did Your County's Jobs Disappear?
An interactive map of vanishing employment across the country, updated with the latest figures.
By Chris Wilson
Developing this map was a leap of faith. While the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a treasure trove of economic and employment data, the files are far too granular to eyeball for a sense of the big picture. The county-by-county employment data for this map came as a 77MB file that was far too large to stick into Excel and sort by year or location. So it wasn't until three-quarters of the way through the development of this map that I first got a real look at the data.
The story here speaks for itself; in the past year, virtually every part of America has seen a catastrophic decline in employment. While it's a bit morbid to marvel over, it is interesting to watch the red circles cascade through the country, striking first in areas like Michigan and spreading from there. Normally, I think that a good editorial multimedia project should be accompanied by a short narrative that guides readers through the data to get them started. In this case, however, the storyline was all too apparent without my gilded prose.
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