Ritchie S. King

I make charts. I build web applications for exploring them. I write narrative explanations that rely on them.

Currently a staff data visualization engineer at Netflix; before that, eight years in journalism as senior editor for data visualization at FiveThirtyEight, a visual journalist at Quartz, and a science writer and graphics editor at the New York Times. I also wrote a programming textbook called Visual Storytelling with D3.

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Professional timeline

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Select Interactive Projects

FiveThirtyEight, where I did most of my work in journalism, was not only shut down by ABC News — all the stories and interactive projects were deleted. I’ve rescued some of them from the Internet Archive and republished them here, on my site. They mostly work! (Shoutout Fable 5).

Map Usually Dem. districtsHighly competitiveUsually Republican
Democratic gerrymander
26327145
District partisan breakdown: Democratic gerrymander
Proportionally partisan
17482179
District partisan breakdown: Proportionally partisan
Majority minority
16982184
District partisan breakdown: Majority minority
Highly competitive
9424299
District partisan breakdown: Highly competitive
Compact (borders)
15599181
District partisan breakdown: Compact (borders)
Compact (algorithmic)
151104180
District partisan breakdown: Compact (algorithmic)
Current
16872195
District partisan breakdown: Current
Republican gerrymander
13921275
District partisan breakdown: Republican gerrymander

all 435 districts, redrawn seven ways, plus the current map for comparison

The Atlas of Redistricting

FiveThirtyEight · Jan 2018 · editor

Seven ways to redraw every congressional district in America. I edited this one, coordinating the cartography, data, and design. Had to convince the lone maintainer of an obscure, long-untouched district-drawing app to pull it out of purgatory and update it with the latest Census data.

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open the interactive

the scatterplot, before you start hacking

Hack Your Way to Scientific Glory

FiveThirtyEight · Aug 2015

A hands-on demonstration of “p-hacking,” the process by which research scientists make small tweaks to their studies to yield a statistically significant, and thus publishable, result. My colleagues had the idea; I found a suitable research question and backing data sets and designed and built the interactive.

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My Book

Cover of Visual Storytelling with D3

Visual Storytelling with D3 (Addison-Wesley, 2014) — an introduction to data visualization for the web, walking through a complete project from raw data to a finished interactive.

“I’ll buy Ritchie a beer if I ever run into him.” — an Amazon reviewer

Graphics-Driven Explainers

Writing

Collected stories for the New York Times, mostly about science and health. All gift links and free to read.