The time of bird seeds and chart tuneups

The recent post about multi-national companies reminded me of an older post, in which I stepped through data table enhancements.

Here is a video of the process. You can use any tool to implement the steps; even Excel is good enough.

 

 

The video is part of a series called "Data science: the Missing Pieces". In these episodes, I cover the parts of data science that are between the cracks, the little things that textbooks and courses do not typically cover - the things that often block students from learning efficiently.

If you have encountered such things, please comment below to suggest future topics. What is something about visualizing data you wish you learned formally?

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P.S. Placed here to please the twitter-bot

 

 

Comments

[Nat turner]

Why didn’t you also put the birds that eat the most popular seeds at the top and move the outlying seed preferences more toward the bottom?

Xxxx xx x. X
Xxxxx
Xxx x. X
Xxx x. X
X x. X. X
X

The data I used here is made up just to illustrate the point I am trying to convey.

What do you think?

[Kaiser]

NT: Yes, that's a decision that will likely split the designers. For me, I feel that the user of this chart is likely to ask the question "what seeds does bird type X like?" So the natural order is alphabetical. Ordering the birds by any metric assumes the user knows where the bird type X ranks on that metric. Additionally, for seeds, I'm assuming that the question "which birds like seed type X?" is not popular. But by arranging the more popular seeds to the left, it helps those reading by row.