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Hog wild about dot maps

Reader Chris P. sent me this chart.

This was meant to be "light entertainment." See the Twitter discussion below.



Let's think a bit about the dot map as a data graphic.

Dot maps are one dimensional. The dot's location is used to indicate the latitude and longitude and therefore the x,y coordinates cannot encode any other data. If we have basically a black/white chart, as in this hog map, the dot can only encode binary data (yes/no).

The legend says "each dot represents 5,000 hogs." Think about how that statement applies to these scenarios:

  • Do you expect to see something different between the dot representing 4,200 and the one showing 4,900?
  • Do you expect to see something different between the dot representing 400 and 4,000?
  • Do you expect to see something different between the location with 4,800 hogs and 9,600 hogs?

Based on the legend, the designer would need two dots to represent 10,000 hogs. But those two dots pertain to the same location. Sometimes, "jitter" is added, and the two dots are placed side by side. However, with the scale of the map of the U.S., and the dots representing seemingly small neighborhoods, jitter creates more confusion than anything. Also, what about 3, 4, 5, .. dots in the same location?


Looking at the details above, are the dots jittered or do they represent neighboring locations?

Sometimes, colors are used to encode data on a dot map. But each dot can only contain one color, so it only typically shows the top category in each location.

Dot maps are very limited. Think before you use them.


Beauty is in the eyes of the fishes

Reader Patrick S. sent in this old gem from Germany.


He said:

It displays the change in numbers of visitors to public pools in the German city of Hanover. The invisible y-axis seems to be, um, nonlinear, but at least it's monotonic, in contrast to the invisible x-axis.

There's a nice touch, though: The eyes of the fish are pie charts. Black: outdoor pools, white: indoor pools (as explained in the bottom left corner).

It's taken from a 1960 publication of the city of Hanover called *Hannover: Die Stadt in der wir leben*.

This is the kind of chart that Ed Tufte made (in)famous. The visual elements do not serve the data at all, except for the eyeballs. The design becomes a mere vessel for the data table. The reader who wants to know the growth rate of swimmers has to do a tank of work.

The eyeballs though.

I like the fact that these pie charts do not come with data labels. This part of the chart passes the self-sufficiency test. In fact, the eyeballs contain the most interesting story in this chart. In those four years, the visitors to public pools switched from mostly indoor pools to mostly outdoor pools. These eyeballs show that pie charts can be effective in specific situations.

Now, Hanover fishes are quite lucky to have free admission to the public pools!

Playfulness in data visualization

The Newslab project takes aggregate data from Google's various services and finds imaginative ways to enliven the data. The Beautiful in English project makes a strong case for adding playfulness to your data visualization.

Newslab_language_wordsnakeThe data came from Google Translate. The authors look at 10 languages, and the top 10 words users ask to translate from those languages into English.

The first chart focuses on the most popular word for each language. The crawling snake presents the "worldwide" top words.

The crawling motion and the curvature are not required by the data but it inserts a dimension of playfulness into the data that engages the reader's attention.

The alternative of presenting a data table loses this virtue without gaining much in return.

Readers are asked to click on the top word in each country to reveal further statistics on the word.

For example, the word "good" leads to the following:




The second chart presents the top 10 words by language in a lollipop style:


The above diagram shows the top 10 Japanese words translated into English. This design sacrifices concise in order to achieve playful.

The standard format is a data table with one column for each country, and 10 words listed below each country header in order of decreasing frequency.

The creative lollipop display generates more extreme emotions - positive, or negative, depending on the reader. The data table is the safer choice, precisely because it does not engage the reader as deeply.



Lines, gridlines, reference lines, regression lines, the works

This post is part 2 of an appreciation of the chart project by Google Newslab, advised by Alberto Cairo, on the gender and racial diversity of the newsroom. Part 1 can be read here.

In the previous discussion, I left out the following scatter bubble plot.


This plot is available in two versions, one for gender and one for race. The key question being asked is whether the leadership in the newsroom is more or less diverse than the rest of the staff.

The story appears to be a happy one: in many newsrooms, the leadership roughly reflects the staff in terms of gender distribution (even though both parts of the whole compare disfavorably to the gender ratio in the neighborhoods, as we saw in the previous post.)


Unfortunately, there are a few execution problems with this scatter plot.

First, take a look at the vertical axis labels on the right side. The labels inform the leadership axis. The mid-point showing 50-50 (parity) is emphasized with the gray band. Around the mid-point, the labels seem out of place. Typically, when the chart contains gridlines, we expect the labels to sit right around each gridline, either on top or just below the line. Here the labels occupy the middle of the space between successive gridlines. On closer inspection, the labels are correctly affixed, and the gridlines  drawn where they are supposed to be. The designer chose to show irregularly spaced labels: from the midpoint, it's a 15% jump on either side, then a 10% jump.

I find this decision confounding. It also seems as if two people have worked on these labels, as there exists two patterns: the first is "X% Leaders are Women", and second is "Y% Female." (Actually, the top and bottom labels are also inconsistent, one using "women" and the other "female".)

The horizontal axis? They left out the labels. Without labels, it is not possible to interpret the chart. Inspecting several conveniently placed data points, I figured that the labels on the six vertical gridlines should be 25%, 35%, ..., 65%, 75%, in essence the same scale as the vertical axis.

Here is the same chart with improved axis labels:


Re-labeling serves up a new issue. The key reference line on this chart isn't the horizontal parity line: it is the 45-degree line, showing that the leadership has the same proprotion of females as the rest of the staff. In the following plot (right side), I added in the 45-degree line. Note that it is positioned awkwardly on top of the grid system. The culprit is the incompatible gridlines.


The solution, as shown below, is to shift the vertical gridlines by 5% so that the 45-degree line bisects every grid cell it touches.



Now that we dealt with the purely visual issues, let me get to a statistical issue that's been troubling me. It's about that yellow line. It's supposed to be a regression line that runs through the points.

Does it appear biased downwards to you? It just seems that there are too many dots above and not enough below. The distance of the furthest points above also appears to be larger than that of the distant points below.

How do we know the line is not correct? Notice that the green 45-degree line goes through the point labeled "AVERAGE." That is the "average" newsroom with the average proportion of female staff and the average proportion of leadership staff. Interestingly, the average falls right on the 45-degree line.

In general, the average does not need to hit the 45-degree line. The average, however, does need to hit the regression line! (For a mathematical explanation, see here.)

Note the corresponding chart for racial diversity has it right. The yellow line does pass through the average point here:



In practice, how do problems seep into dataviz projects? It's the fact that you don't get to the last chart via a clean, streamlined process but that you pass through a cycle of explore-retrench-synthesize, frequently bouncing ideas between several people, and it's challenging to keep consistency!

And let me repeat my original comment about this project - the key learning here is how they took a complex dataset with many variables, broke it down into multiple parts addressing specific problems, and applied the layering principle to make each part of the project digestible.



Well-structured, interactive graphic about newsrooms




















Discoloring the chart to re-discover its plot





Here is a more restrained view:













