Where to get Bojangles biscuits

Elliot Bentley

Hi, this is Elliot. I work on Datawrapper’s visualization code and recently I’ve been working on some new features for our maps. Can you spot any in this Weekly Chart?

When I moved from the U.K. to the U.S., I distinctly remember my tar heel housemates being obsessed with the restaurant Bojangles. Unlike McDonald’s or Taco Bell, this fast-food chain — which specializes in the extremely southern cuisine of chicken and biscuits — is hugely popular in some parts of the country but completely absent in others.

This week, via the excellent Data is Plural newsletter, I discovered a project called All The Places, which is building a dataset of “about as many places of business in the world as possible.”

One of those places of business is Bojangles, and I figured it would be fun to map its specific geographic footprint.

I created this map using two new features we launched last month: the cropped view, which allowed me to zoom in on just the parts of the U.S. with restaurant locations, and the helpful inset map, which you can see in the top left hand corner.

Legend has it there was once a Bojangles in New York City — just around the corner from my first apartment in Bushwick, in fact. Which makes me wonder how the restaurant’s footprint has changed over time. Now that would be a tasty dataset.

That’s the end of this week’s post! Our CEO David will be back for refills next week.

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Elliot Bentley

(he/him, vis.social/@ejb) is a senior data visualization developer at Datawrapper. He previously worked on interactive graphics and internal tools at The Wall Street Journal and created the popular web app oTranscribe. Outside of work, Elliot likes to make his own video games. He lives in London.

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