Data Viz Done Right

September 19, 2009

Katrina Contracts

I read a story recently about Halliburton and the incredible number of contracts and money they scored from Hurricane Katrina. Oh by the way, George Bush was President, Dick Cheney was VP and Cheney was CEO of Halliburton from 1995-2000.

That led me to finding how Katrina contracts were being awarded by government Department. It's been tough to identify just which contracts were awarded to Halliburton since most of them are to subsidiaries. I'm working to gather all of those. The data was gathered from the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS).

This is a very simple analysis, well not really much analysis at all, but in this instance, given the amount of information I want to display, I actually think the pie chart works better. Thoughts?


  1. I think the bar chart shows the magnitude of the differences more clearly.

  2. How did I know you would say that? :-)

    I think putting the % on the bars helps. To your point, all I'm trying to show is the magnitude which the bar charts show quickly and clearly.