Our chief sources for A Visual History of the Supreme Court of the United States are listed below:

Epstein, Lee, Thomas G. Walker, Nancy Staudt, Scott Hendrickson, and Jason Roberts. (2010). “The U.S. Supreme Court Justices Database.” Chicago, IL: Northwestern University School of Law, January 26.
http://epstein.law.northwestern.edu/research/justicesdata.html.

Andrew D. Martin and Kevin M. Quinn. 2002. “Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953-1999.” Political Analysis. 10:134-153. http://mqscores.wustl.edu/measures.php.

The Oyez Project. http://www.oyez.org/.

U.S. Department of Justice. “Solicitors General of the United States.”
http://www.justice.gov/osg/aboutosg/sglist.html.

Hogue, Henry B. CRS Report for Congress, “Supreme Court Nominations Not Confirmed, 1789-2004,” 21 March 2005.
http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/50146.pdf [PDF].

The information we used regarding the presidents (dates of terms, etc.) are widely available. We used workers in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to fact-check our names and dates. We initially approached Mechanical Turk as an experiment in outsourcing fact-checking; the work we received from its workers ran the gamut from useful to wacky. The useful work, though, proved the experiment to be worth it — we received thoughtful comments on everything from design and layout to the presentation of the data itself.

Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/. A note on Wikipedia: We find Wikipedia to be a highly useful source for finding information quickly. However, since it is an open platform (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citing_Wikipedia), we made sure to corroborate any first findings on Wikipedia with other sources.

The rise and fall of Tiger Woods (thus far, at least) — click for full view:

UPDATE: Commenter Brian F. asked for “a similar graph but with wins and finishes per tournament (rather than raw totals).” I added a line to the chart representing percentage of tournaments won; it uses the secondary Y axis on the right side of the graph. Click for full view. Thanks for the comment!

[Source for raw numbers: Wikipedia]

The political controversies surrounding Obama’s recent spate of recess appointments made us wonder how President Obama compares to other past presidents and their recess appointments. Looking at a simple bar chart graphing recess appointments since FDR, it’s not surprising to see that current complainants are taking a shortsighted approach to the issue. Click on the chart below to see a full-sized version.

UPDATE: As per some Facebook users’ suggestions, I’ve created a better chart that now controls for length of time in office. The chart below compares the presidents by ratio of days in office to total recess appointments. Quite a difference! Click to see a full-sized version:

(Thanks to Beth at the Senate Historical Office for sending over the data within minutes of my research request — impressive response time!)

As a side project, I’ve been compiling some raw data on women in the U.S. Congress: senators and representatives, committee chairs, party leaders, significant elections, et cetera. Just charting a stacked graph of women in Congress since 1789 clearly shows why history is such an obstacle to women in American politics — and why the U.S. can’t seem to reach even just 20 percent female representation in Congress.

Globally, the U.S. ranks 74th in percentage of women serving in parliaments or lower houses of Congress, sandwiched in between Turkmenistan and Albania (and ranking far below Bangladesh, Serbia, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Moldova, and Sudan, among others).

Check out the chart (click to enlarge):

Using official numbers from the Congressional Research Service and the Department of Defense, we’ve charted U.S. military deaths and wounded per major conflict from the Revolutionary War onward. It’s interesting to see the contrasts between nominal numbers and those as a percentage of the total population — WWII and the Civil War had comparable killed/wounded numbers, for example, but deaths in the Civil War constituted a much higher percent of the total population.

Also interesting are the similarities between the Mexican-American War and the Iraq War; about the same percentage of Americans have been killed in both wars, though the number of Americans killed in Iraq is much higher than those killed in the Mexican-American War. (Data for Iraq & Afghanistan is accurate through March 6, 2010, and is according to official DoD tallies.)

There’s an argument for using either statistic, and it’s an issue we’ve been discussing as we worked out the numbers. I think the numbers as a percentage of population are more interesting than nominal numbers because it can serve as an assessment of the relative impact of a conflict on society at the time; but Nathaniel makes the point that, in essence, every death is a death, and has an equal impact on the community no matter what the national population happens to be.

The chart is posted below. Forgive me for the poor labeling: there are no labels on the top chart’s x-axis, but I did label the furthest-reaching bar to give you a semblance of relativity. (I also know there are lots of problems with this bar chart — for example, the Civil War is such an outstanding plot point that it skews the rest of the data — but it was just a quick mockup, so bear with me).

Click to enlarge:

“There is a magic in graphs. The profile of a curve reveals in a flash a whole situation – the life history of an epidemic, a panic, or an era of prosperity. The curve informs the mind, awakens the imagination, convinces.”

This is the first paragraph of the preface of Graphic Presentation, a 1939 book posted online recently by the National Archives. The book’s preface, entitled Magic in Graphs, was composed by Henry D. Hubbard, then Secretary of the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC. Hubbard’s description of the utility and beauty behind infographics is still just as relevant today as it was in 1939. The full page is posted below — definitely worth a read!

Click to enlarge:

In an effort to chart the U.S. economy in relation to each presidency, we did extensive research to determine the best measure of business cycles over time. In the end, the two data points we chose to best represent the ebb and flow of the U.S. economy were the most basic: consumer price index (CPI) and gross domestic product (GDP). Our chart, which will likely appear in our upcoming Visual History of the American Presidency, calculates percent change per year for both measures and overlays the two.

Attempting to display this data in relation to the presidency leads to the obvious question of the relative amount of control the president wields over the U.S. economy. With the rising influence of external multinational economic powerhouses like the EU, OPEC, and ASEAN, is economic strength (or weakness) really a valid measure of presidential success? Clinton and Reagan each presided over the most recent economic expansions and are two of the nation’s most popular presidents in recent history. Do they deserve the credit?

We ultimately decided to include measures of CPI and GDP as an indicator of presidential success, but it seems that White House control over the domestic economy is waning as external forces challenge U.S. economic hegemony. For now, at least, the issue is prescient; stay tuned for A Visual History of the American Presidency, and leave thoughts in the comments below!

Among the multiple data sets we’ve been collecting for our upcoming History of the American Presidency, I’ve been working on researching various economic data points. For the past couple days, I’ve been trying to find a good measure of U.S. debt (public, private, or both) as a percentage of GDP over time. The following article gives a pretty good explanation of why the data is so complex, and why it’s taking a bit longer than originally planned to find consistent numbers:

http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/2/us-debt-levels-are-fine-debt-to-gdp-chart-is-wrong-and-meaningless

I’m still working on it, but leave any ideas below in the comments…