iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 14/08/2026

This @nytimes.com page updates automatically every day, catching me off guard in my RSS reader. The headline is … slightly out of date. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

New York Times headline "Tracking Freezing Temperatures Across Europe", with a timestamp of August 14, 2026. The current temperature in London is 33°C (92°F)

140

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 14/08/2026

Definitely the weirdest version yet of our UK by-election chart. www.ft.com/content/1bc8...

Slope chart of the recent electoral history of the Clacton constituency, including the result of the August 13,2016 by-election, which was won by Reform's Nigel Farage on an increased majority and Count Binface second on just under 27% of the vote.

0205

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 28/07/2026

… and @ryonamiki.bsky.social showed us it's possible to make a shake intensity map using the Japanese data: www.ft.com/content/568e...

Map of the shake intensity of today's earthquake in Japan's Kumamoto prefecture, as measured by the Japan Meteorological Agency Seismic Intensity Scale, instead of the Modified Mercalli intensity scale.

063

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 12/06/2026

Great to see our new live markets data graphic widget for the @financialtimes.com homepage get its first outing for the SpaceX IPO. Amazing work here from @peter.andringa.me and Dan Clark:

Screenshot of the FInancial Times homepage, including a live-updating chart of the SpaceX share price on the day of its IPO.

1100

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 15/12/2025

Never let the north-up convention get in the way of a good election map!

Front page of Chile's El Mercurio newspaper, leading with an election results map of the country oriented with north on the left and south on the right.

0151

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 09/10/2025

Great piece of data journalism on the widespread anomalies in council tax banding, by @jonathanvincent.bsky.social and Sam Fleming and involving our great engineering teams on both the front- and back-end of the project. #ddj Plus a nod to some classic #dataviz design by @theboysmithy.ft.com:

A grid of small charts compares trends in house prices and council tax bills across UK local authorities since 1995. Each chart shows two indexed lines: one for average house prices (blue) and one for average council tax bills (grey), both normalised to 1 in 1995.

The top section displays towns and cities in northern England — such as Barnsley, Bradford, Burnley, County Durham, Northumberland, North Yorkshire, Preston, Redcar and Cleveland, and Sunderland — where the two lines rise together over time, indicating that house prices and council tax bills have increased broadly in line.

The lower section forms a cartogram map of London boroughs, where house prices have risen much faster than council tax bills. In boroughs such as Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, Camden, Hackney, Islington, and Waltham Forest, the blue line representing house prices climbs steeply compared to the flatter grey council tax line. The layout mirrors the approximate geography of London, with boroughs like Enfield and Barnet at the top and Croydon, Bromley, and Sutton at the bottom.

Source: Financial Times analysis of data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Valuation Office Agency (VOA). London cartogram design based on a concept by Max Gadney and Mike Gallagher.

1173

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 13/03/2025

Further important 🐹📈 data journalism from @louisashworth.bsky.social and cartography from @theboysmithy.ft.com about the cost of small caged mammals (scm) in the UK: www.ft.com/content/f1cb...

A grid map showing the regional variation in the changing cost of small caged mammels in the uk.

0124

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 07/03/2025

Our stories often downplay the computational lift that goes into getting them. Suffice it to say "a Financial Times analysis of blockchain data" denotes some really impressive data journalism work from @olihawkins.com, @eadehemingway.bsky.social and @nikasgari.bsky.social.

A methodology note at the foot of the story linked to in the post, which reads:

How the FT calculated the $TRUMP earnings

The FT analysed data from the Solana blockchain, following the movement of Trump coin from its creation on January 17 to the end of its first few weeks of trading.

The coin’s initial distribution was primarily managed by four accounts, which set up a “liquidity pool” on Meteora, a decentralised exchange, in order to sell most of that initial distribution.

The FT downloaded the full transaction history of these accounts during this period, as well as the transactions within the liquidity pool. From this we have been able to reconstruct how the coin was traded and at what prices.

The $350mn is a floor estimate. More money would have been made via sales on other platforms. It is not possible to calculate how much was made from transactions that took place off the blockchain.

37921

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 15/01/2025

The Palisades fire in LA overlaid on a map of central London. calmatters.org/environment/...

A map showing the area of the Palisades fire in Los Angeles overlaid on a map of central London.

12912

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 09/12/2024

I’ve re-read Jonathan Stray‘s 2019 paper on the difficult economics of AI in investigative journalism several times this year as we have run into several of the issues he identified. This is the one I keep coming back to: jonathanstray.com/papers/Makin...

Except from a journal article that reads: "When Al is used in a commercial setting there is typically an ongoing business problem to be solved. Transactional data such as clicks and purchases arrives in continuous streams, and a model trained on this data can be used as long as the underlying stream is stable. By contrast, many data-driven investigative stories are never repeated. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's model for finding documents describing sexual abuse by doctors will never be useful again, because there is not another backlog of 100,000 reports to examine. In such cases the cost of building a custom Al solution cannot be amortized over multiple stories."

271

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 16/11/2024

After reading this line I had to check the date to make sure this wasn’t a story from the archive, circa 2008. www.theguardian.com/media/2024/n...

Highlighted Text from a Guardian story quoting Express editor Gary Jones: “my vision for the Express is that every reporter and editor is able to upload content to the website, and there’s no segregation between ‘print’ and ‘digital’ …”

0120

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 13/11/2024

… und die vorläufige Ergebnisse für 2024 zeigen für diesen County erheblich kleinere Gesamtzahlen als die AP-Daten: enr.sos.mo.gov/CountyResult...

Screenshot of the unofficial results of the 2024 presidential election result in Jackson county, Missouri

000

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 13/11/2024

Interessant. Die MIT-Zahlen stimmen mit dem offiziellen Wahlbericht von Jackson County as den Jahr 2020 überein … jcebmo.org/wp-content/u...

Official report of the 2020 presidential election in Jackson county, Missouri.

200

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 07/11/2024

I'm immensely proud of all the amazing live-updating graphics the @data.ft.com team published over the last 48 hours (and continues to publish). But there's still a thrill to seeing them appear in print the next day:

Pages 4 and 23 of the UK print edition of the Financial Times of Thursday November 7 2024, showing a large number of graphics related to the US election.

38316

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 05/11/2024

📌 for tonight (from around 11pm GMT): ft.com/election

2174

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 05/11/2024

The completely rebuilt @data.ft.com US election results site is live. The six voters of of Dixville Notch in New Hampshire have of course already voted and reported their results: ig.ft.com/us-elections...

Screenshot showing the first reported results of the 2024 US presidential election reported on the the Financial Times' website.

35917

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 12/03/2024

📊 Endlich auch auf Deutsch verfügbar: das Poster „Visueller Wortschatz“ von @data.ft.com. Wir freuen uns über Anmerkungen und Ausbesserungen aus der deutschsprachigen #ddj und #dataviz Community! github.com/Financial-Ti...

Screenshot of the new German version of the Financial Times’ "Visual Vocabulary", a poster designed to help journalists select the best data visualisation format for a given narrative intent.

063

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 06/03/2024

I learned… just a bit of detail about the administrative geography of New England prepping maps for Super Tuesday, so it's great to see this all finally come together: www.ft.com/content/17e9...

Closeup of a choropleth map of northern New England, showing the margin of the winning candidate in the Republican Super Tuesday primaries in Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts at the municipality level.

140

Martin Stabe @martinstabe.ft.com · 18/01/2024

Learning much about the quirks of New Hampshire geography this week. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin%...

Closeup of a map of New Hampshire showing the unincorporated territory Martin’s Location.

140