Visualizing Data on Voters, Energy, Buildings, Temperatures — DataViz Weekly
From the data visualization we keep coming across on the web, some projects catch our attention more than the rest. We save those for DataViz Weekly to show what works in practice.
Here another four to take a closer look at:
- Voters in the U.S. House battlegrounds — The Washington Post
- China’s surplus wind and solar power — Bloomberg
- The age of every building in Paris — Alexander Bogachev
- Sea temperatures around the Pacific Islands — Elia Kabanov
Voters in U.S. House Battlegrounds
Every seat in the U.S. House of Representatives is up for election on November 3. Most of them reliably stay with one party. Control of the chamber is likely to come down to the few dozen where either side could win.
The Washington Post used census data to profile the people living in these battlegrounds. The article starts with a short quiz. Its three questions cover race and ethnicity, homeownership, and the kind of place people live in. Each comes with a dot map of congressional districts. Faint points mark races whose outcome is fairly certain, and the contested ones are highlighted. Color shows which side is favored, and hovering reveals each one’s name and rating. Once you answer, the map transforms into a beeswarm chart. Lined up by the trait in question, the points show how the battlegrounds compare with the rest.
Further into the article, bar charts repeat that comparison for one trait at a time, from homeownership to marriage. They also include the safe and likely seats of both parties, plus Colorado’s 8th District, home to the voter at the center of the story.
👉 Take a look at the story on The Washington Post, by Teo Armus, Clara Ence Morse, and Eric Lau.
China’s Surplus Wind and Solar Power
China has more wind and solar capacity than any other country, and it keeps building at a pace no one else matches. Many of the turbines and panels stand in remote regions, far from the cities and factories that use the most power. Not all the electricity they could generate reaches the grid.
Bloomberg used a Sankey diagram to chart how much wind and solar output goes unused in each province. Every province gets a bar sized by its generation. Gray-blue marks what was produced, and red at the right end shows the losses. Solid red is curtailment reported by officials, and hatching marks an extra share estimated by researchers. Regional groups set the remote energy hubs apart from those near the main centers of demand. Streams flow down from all of them and merge into a national total for the first half of 2026. Smaller bars underneath compare it with the same months of 2024 and 2022.
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Further down, the article turns to storage and transmission. Battery capacity appears on a proportional symbol map, ultra-high-voltage lines on a connector map, and pumped-storage plants on a dot map. Each one separates projects in operation from those still to come.
👉 See the article on Bloomberg, by Dan Murtaugh and Jin Wu.
Age of Every Building in Paris
Paris has been built up over many centuries. Its streets mix medieval churches, 17th-century mansions, stone apartment blocks from the Haussmann era, and modern towers.
Alexander Bogachev built a 3D map of all 122,435 buildings in the city, each colored by the period it dates from. Twelve periods run from the Middle Ages to the present, with blues for the oldest and reds for the newest. When the page loads, Paris assembles itself in time-lapse, beginning in the 900s. A timeline of stacked dots along the bottom then lets you pick any year.
Point at any building to see its date, height, and floors, sometimes with a photo. Choose a street, and its two sides line up as parallel rows, labeled with addresses and landmark names. Panorama mode brings you down to ground level, where you can stroll around. A switch also recolors everything by number of floors. Hours can slip by unnoticed.
👉 Explore the map on Alexander Bogachev’s website.
Sea Temperatures Around Pacific Islands
Pacific Island countries and territories are scattered across the largest ocean on Earth. Life there is tied to the sea, from fishing to the coral reefs that shelter the coasts. Ocean heat puts both at risk.
Elia Kabanov plotted sea-surface temperatures around 21 of these countries and territories since 1850. The main view is a diverging column chart made of waffle-like stacks of small squares. Every place gets one per year. Those warmer than their historical average rise above a center line in shades of red, and cooler ones hang below it in blue. In each column, they are ranked by temperature. Over time, the red side grows and the blue one shrinks.
Hovering over a square gives the place and its difference from the average, in degrees Celsius. A caption at the top counts how many were warmer that year. Clicking one, or choosing from a menu, switches to a line chart of that location’s own history.
👉 Check out the project on Elia Kabanov’s website.
That concludes this edition of DataViz Weekly, our regular feature:
👉 DataViz Weekly on AnyChart Blog
👉 DataViz Weekly on Medium
In every edition, we choose data visualization projects from across the internet and present them as examples. Open the originals to see each one in full. Past editions hold many more data visualization examples, and the next installment is already in the works.
Stay tuned.
Originally published at https://www.anychart.com on October 16, 2026.
