Election cycles are always great opportunities to explore new ways of displaying complicated information. As TV and the internet give us unfettered access to more and more data, the problem of making sense of it all gets magnified exponentially. There are a number of people doing incredible work in this field, both in print and online, and I've been sampling some of the results for the last few weeks.

Today I ran across this map of newspaper endorsments in the 2008 election, and I thought it was worth a mention. Not only is the map view useful, but the depth of the information is fantastic; they're showing multiple layers for each individual data point in a pleasing and useful way. Notice that the undecided newspapers are almost invisible, which I didn't like at first. Below that is a side-by-side bar chart with a nicely-designed rollover display of data, which gives an alternate view of the information.