Here are a few ways I’ve visualized data recently:

I wrote a script to analyze state and national voting data and found that Arkansas' absentee ballots were rejected at five times the rate of absentee ballots nationally. Then, I created an interactive map of rejections by county and pushed my code to Github.

I created interactive tables and maps of covid-19 cases at Arkansas' k-12 school districts and colleges for our Coronavirus tracking page.

Another reporter wanted an interactive graphic showing chronic student absenteeism at each school in the Little Rock School District. The data contained three different years, and I know that this type of education data can fluctuate quite a bit year-to-year. I thought a range plot would give a good idea of consistency while also being able to compare schools.
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2019/aug/11/high-absence-rates-plague-lr-district-2/
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We’ve had a lot of levee struggles in Arkansas. So when historic flooding brought the problems back up again, the state set aside several million dollars to help. I’d mapped levees along the Arkansas River previously, but this map, created just using MyMaps, contains links to project summaries to fix the levees, records I scanned using the Notes app on my iPhone. It also distinguishes levee conditions, by color. I know a more sophisticated map could be made using MapBox, but I put this entire map together in an afternoon, while I was on deadline for the story and other tasks.
​https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/jan/17/state-to-hand-out-8-8m-for-repairs-of-f/
I was the first person in our newsroom to start making covid-19 maps, including cases by county and cases by state, using both R and Datawrapper. Eventually, our multimedia editor took over those maps, but I continue to update another covid-19 page that I came up with on the economic impacts of the pandemic.
https://www.arkansasonline.com/economy/
I made a searchable table of CARES Act funding to the state’s higher education institutions, using the PDF from the U.S. Department of Education of all schools in the country, Tabula, R and Datawrapper. Most news outlets put the PDF in Tabula and posted what it spat out in an interactive table. I went a step further and joined the data with two other federal datasets so that I could identify the institution’s state, city and latest enrollment, then narrow them down to Arkansas. Our table ended up being more robust than what was published in the only local news release about it, from all of Arkansas’ Congressmen, who identified only about 50 Arkansas schools in their release. I’ve pasted the code I wrote in R below.
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/apr/12/u-s-sets-130m-for-state-colleges-202004/
I knew readers would have a lot of questions about what the AP found in its analysis of dam safety conditions across the U.S., so I decided to contact each dam owner so I could put their explanation for their dam’s poor safety rating in an interactive map of each dam. Part of the reason I did this was because of the problems I had using the state’s data and the AP’s data; sometimes the data didn’t match public records. Usually it did. But this kind of information, while essential, simply can’t fit in a story, so I mapped it.
​https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2019/nov/18/high-risk-dams-in-rough-shape-state-dat/
Here’s the first interactive map I created in R, made on the same day I covered a day-long University of Arkansas Board of Trustees meeting. It was for a Census story I also wrote, which ran the next day on the front page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette alongside my dispatch from the trustees’ meeting. I used a Census API in R to illustrate a story about how Arkansas had some of the biggest population drops and increases of cities and towns across the country. It showed how unequally Arkansas’ more recent economic success had been distributed across the state, one of many new angles and visualizations I explore for every Census release. Because I made the map on my work computer and we are currently working from home, I don’t have the R code. Nowadays, on a short-turnaround story like a Census data release, I’d convert a Census places shape file into a JSON using mapshaper, and then import that into Datawrapper, which is better for online presentation if you need to create headline and chatter elements within the file itself.
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2019/may/23/rural-urban-shift-continuing-latest-cen/