The elusive meaning of black paintings and red blocks

Joe N, a longtime reader, tweeted about the following chart, by the People's Policy Project:

This is a simple column chart containing only two numbers, far exceeded by the count of labels and gridlines.

I look at charts like the lady staring at these Ad Reinhardts:

 

My artist friends say the black squares are not the same, if you look hard enough.

Here is what I learned after one such seating:

The tiny data labels sitting on the inside top edges of the columns hint that the right block is slightly larger than the left block.

The five labels of the vertical axis serve no purpose, nor the gridlines.

The horizontal axis for time is reversed, with 2019 appearing after 2020 (when read left to right).

The left block has one month while the right block has 12 months. This is further confused by the word "All" which shares the same starting and ending letters as "April".

As far as I can tell, the key message of this chart is that the month of April has the impact of a full year. It's like 12 months of outflows from employment hitting the economy in one month.

***

My first response is this chart:

Breaking the left block into 12 pieces, and color-coding the April piece brings out the comparison. You can also see that in 2019, the outflows from employment to unemployment were steady month to month.

Next, I want to see what happens if I restored the omitted months of Jan to March, 2020.

The story changes slightly. Now, the chart says that the first four months have already exceeded the full year of 2019.

Since the values hold steady month to month, with the exception of April 2020, I make a monthly view:

You can see the slight nudge-up in March 2020 as well. This draws more attention to the break in pattern.

For time-series data, I prefer to look at line charts:

As I explained in this post about employment statistics (or Chapter 6 of Numbersense (link)), the Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies people into three categories: Employed, Unemployed and Not in Labor Force. Exits from Employed to Unemployed status contribute to unemployment in the U.S. To depict a negative trend, it's often natural to use negative numbers:

You may realize that this data series paints only a partial picture of the health of the labor market. While some people exit the Employed status each month, there are others who re-enter or enter the Employed status. We should really care about net flows.

In all of 2019, there were more entrants than exits, leading to a slightly positive net inflow to the Employed status from Unemployed (blue line). In April 2020, the red line (exits) drags the blue line dramatically.

Of course, even this chart is omitting important information. There are also flows from Employed to and from Not in Labor Force.

 

 

 

 

 

Hope and reality in one Georgia chart

Over the weekend, Georgia's State Health Department agitated a lot of people when it published the following chart:

(This might have appeared a week ago as the last date on the chart is May 9 and the title refers to "past 15 days".)

They could have avoided the embarrassment if they had read my article at DataJournalism.com (link). In that article, I lay out a set of the "unspoken conventions," things that visual designers are, or should be, doing more or less in their sleep. Under the section titled "Order", I explain the following two "rules":

• Place values in the natural order when it is available
• Retain the same order across all plots in a panel of charts

In the chart above, the natural order for the horizontal (time) axis is time running left to right. The order chosen by the designer  is roughly but not precisely decreasing height of the tallest column in each daily group. Many observers suggested that the columns were arranged to give the appearance of cases dropping over time.

Within each day, the counties are ordered in decreasing number of new cases. The title of the chart reads "number of cases over time" which sounds like cumulative cases but it's not. The "lead" changed hands so many times over the 15 days, meaning the data sequence was extremely noisy, which would be unlikely for cumulative cases. There are thousands of cases in each of these counties by May. Switching the order of the columns within each daily group defeats the purpose of placing these groups side-by-side.

Responding to the bad press, the department changed the chart design for this week's version:

This chart now conforms to the two spoken rules described above. The time axis runs left to right, and within each group of columns, the order of the counties is maintained.

The chart is still very noisy, with no apparent message.

***

Next, I'd like to draw your attention to a Data issue. Notice that the 15-day window has shifted. This revised chart runs from May 2 to May 16, which is this past Saturday. The previous chart ran from Apr 26 to May 9. 

Here's the data for May 8 and 9 placed side by side.

There is a clear time lag of reporting cases in the State of Georgia. This chart should always exclude the last few days. The case counts keep going up until it stabilizes. The same mistake occurs in the revised chart - the last two days appear as if new cases have dwindled toward zero when in fact, it reflects a lag in reporting.

The disconnect between the Question being posed and the quality of the Data available dooms this visualization. It is not possible to provide a reliable assessment of the "past 15 days" when during perhaps half of that period, the cases are under-counted.

***

This graphical distortion due to "immature" data has become very commonplace in Covid-19 graphics. It's similar to placing partial-year data next to full-year results, without calling out the partial data.

The following post from the ancient past (2005!) about a New York Times graphic shows that calling out this data problem does not actually solve it. It's a less-bad kind of thing.

The coronavirus data present more headaches for graphic designers than the financial statistics. Because of accounting regulations, we know that only the current quarter's data are immature. For Covid-19 reporting, the numbers are being adjusted for days and weeks.

Practically all immature counts are under-estimates. Over time, more cases are reported. Thus, any plots over time - if unadjusted - paint a misleading picture of declining counts. The effect of the reporting lag is predictable, having a larger impact as we run from left to right in time. Thus, even if the most recent data show a downward trend, it can eventually mean anything: down, flat or up. This is not random noise though - we know for certain of the downward bias; we just don't know the magnitude of the distortion for a while.

Another issue that concerns coronavirus reporting but not financial reporting is inconsistent standards across counties. Within a business, if one were to break out statistics by county, the analysts would naturally apply the same counting rules. For Covid-19 data, each county follows its own set of rules, not just  how to count things but also how to conduct testing, and so on.

Finally, with the politics of re-opening, I find it hard to trust the data. Reported cases are human-driven data - by changing the number of tests, by testing different mixes of people, by delaying reporting, by timing the revision of older data, by explicit manipulation, ...., the numbers can be tortured into any shape. That's why it is extremely important that the bean-counters are civil servants, and that politicians are kept away. In the current political environment, that separation between politics and statistics has been breached.

***

Why do we have low-quality data? Human decisions, frequently political decisions, adulterate the data. Epidemiologists are then forced to use the bad data, because that's what they have. Bad data lead to bad predictions and bad decisions, or if the scientists account for the low quality, predictions with high levels of uncertainty. Then, the politicians complain that predictions are wrong, or too wide-ranging to be useful. If they really cared about those predictions, they could start by being more transparent about reporting and more proactive at discovering and removing bad accounting practices. The fact that they aren't focused on improving the data gives the game away. Here's a recent post on the politics of data.

 

Twitter people UpSet with that Covid symptoms diagram

Been busy with an exciting project, which I might talk about one day. But I promised some people I'll follow up on Covid symptoms data visualization, so here it is.

After I posted about the Venn diagram used to depict self-reported Covid-19 symptoms by users of the Covid Symptom Tracker app (reported by Nature), Xan and a few others alerted me to Twitter discussion about alternative visualizations that people have made after they suffered the indignity of trying to parse the Venn diagram.

To avoid triggering post-trauma, for those want to view the Venn diagram, please click here.

[In the Twitter links below, you almost always have to scroll one message down - saving tweets, linking to tweets, etc. are all stuff I haven't fully figured out.]

Start with the Questions

Xan’s final comment is especially appropriate: "There's an over-riding Type-Q issue: count charts answer the wrong question".

As dataviz designers, we frequently get locked into the mindset of “what is the best way to present this dataset?” This line of thinking leads to overloaded graphics that attempt to answer every possible question that may arise from the data in one panoptic chart, akin to juggling 10 balls at once.

For complex datasets, it is often helpful to narrow down the list of questions, and provide a series of charts, each addressing one or two questions. I’ll come back to this point. I want to first show some of the nicer visuals that others have produced, which brings out the structure and complexity of this dataset.

 

The UpSet chart

The primary contender is the “UpSet” chart form, as best exemplified by Bart’s effort

The centerpiece of this chart is the matrix of dots. The horizontal rows of dots represent the presence of specific symptoms such as cough and anosmia (loss of smell and taste). The vertical columns are intuitive, once you get it. They represent combinations of symptoms, and the fill/no-fill of the dots indicates which symptoms are being combined. For example, the first column counts people reporting fatigue plus anosmia (but nothing else).

The UpSet chart clearly communicates the structure of the data. In many survey questions (including this one conducted by the Symptom Tracker app), respondents are allowed to check/tick more than one answer choices. This creates a situation where the number of answers (here, symptoms) per respondent can be zero up to the total number of answer choices.

So far, we have built a structure like we have drawn country outlines on a map. There is no data yet. The data are primarily found in the sidebar histograms (column/bar charts). Reading horizontally to the right side, one learns that the most frequently reported symptom was fatigue, covering 88 percent of the users.* Reading vertically, one learns that the top combination of symptoms was fatigue plus anosmia, covering 16 percent of users.

***

Now come the divisive acts.

Act 1: Bart orders the columns in a particular way that meets his subjective view of how he wants readers to see the data. The columns are sorted from the most frequent combinations to the least. The histogram has a “long tail”, with most of the combinations receiving a small proportion of the total. The top five combinations is where the bulk of the data is – I’d have liked to see all five columns labeled, without decimal places.

This is a choice on the part of the designer. Nils, for example, made two versions of his UpSet charts. The second version arranges the combinations from singles to quintuples.

 

Digression: The Visual in Data Visualization

The two rendering of “UpSet” charts, by Nils and Bart, is a perfect illustration of the Trifecta Checkup framework. Each corner of the Trifecta is an independent dimension, and yet all must sync. With the same data and the same question types, what differentiates the two versions is the visual design.

See how many differences you can find, and make your own design choices!

 

I place the digression here because Act 1 above has to do with the Q corner, and both visual designs can accommodate the sorting decisions. But Act 2 below pertains to the V corner.

Act 2: Bart applies a blue gradient to the matrix of dots that reinforces his subjective view about identifying frequent combinations of symptoms. Nils, by contrast, uses the matrix to show present/absent only.

I’m not sure about Act 2. I think the addition of the color gradient overloads the matrix in the chart. It has the nice effect of focusing the reader’s attention on the top 5 combinations but it also requires the reader to have understood the meaning of columns first. Perhaps applying the gradient to the histogram up top rather than the dots in the matrix can achieve the same goal with less confusion.

 

Getting Obtuse

For example, some readers (e.g. Robin) expressed confusion.

Robin is alleging something the chart doesn’t do. He pointed out (correctly) that while 16 percent experienced fatigue and anosmia only (without other symptoms), more than 50 percent reported fatigue and anosmia, plus other symptoms. That nugget of information is deeply buried inside Bart’s chart – it’s the sum of each column for which the first two dots are filled in. For example, the second column represents fatigue+anosmia+cough. So Robin wants to aggregate those up.

Robin’s critique arises from the Q(uestion) corner. If the designer wants to highlight specific combinations that occur most frequently in the data, then Bart’s encoding makes perfect sense. On the other hand, if the purpose is to highlight pairs of symptoms that occur most frequently together (disregarding symptoms outside each pair), then the data must be further aggregated. The switch in the Question requires more Data manipulation, which then affects the Visualization. That's the essence of the Trifecta Checkup framework.

Rest assured, the version that addresses Robin’s point will not give an easy answer to Bart’s question. In fact, Xan whipped up a bar chart in response:

This is actually hard to comprehend because Robin’s question is even hard to state. The first bar shows 87 percent of users reported fatigue as a symptom, the same number that appeared on Bart’s version on the right side. Then, the darkened section of the bar indicates the proportion of users who reported only fatigue and nothing else, which appears to be about 10 percent. So 1 out of 9 reported just fatigue while 8 out of 9 who reported fatigue also experienced other symptoms.

 

Xan’s bar chart can be flipped 90 degrees and replace Bart’s histogram on top of the matrix. But you see, we end up with the same problem as I mentioned up top. By jamming more insights from more questions onto the same chart, we risk dropping the other balls that were already in the air.

So, my advice is always to first winnow down the list of questions you want to address. And don’t be afraid of making a series of charts instead of one panoptic chart.

***

Act 3: Bart decides to leave out labels for the columns.

This is a curious choice given the key storyline we’ve been working with so far (the Top 5 combinations of symptoms). But notice how annoying this problem is. Combinations require long text, which must be written vertically or slanted on this design. Transposing could help but not really. It’s just a limitation of this chart form. For me, reading the filled dots underneath the columns as column labels isn’t a show-stopper.

 

Histograms vs Bar Charts

It’s worth pointing out that the sidebar “histograms” are not both histograms. I tend to think of histograms as a specific type of bar (column) chart, in which the sum of the bars (columns) can be interpreted as a whole. So all histograms are bar charts but only some bar charts are histograms.

The column chart up top is a histogram. The combinations of symptoms are disjoint, and the total of the combinations should be the total number of answer choices selected by all respondents. The bar chart on the right side however is not a histogram. Each percentage is a proportion to the whole, and adding those percentages yields way above 100%.

I like the annotation on Bart’s chart a lot. They are succinct and they give just the right information to explain how to read the chart.

 

Limitations

I already mentioned the vertical labeling issue for UpSet charts. Here are two other considerations for you.

The majority of the plotting area is dedicated to the matrix of dots. The matrix contains merely labels for data. They are like country boundaries on a map. While it lays out the structure of data very clearly, the designer should ask whether it is essential for the readers to see the entire landscape.

In real-world data, the “long tail” phenomenon we saw earlier is very common. With six featured symptoms, there are 2^6 = 64 possible combinations of symptoms (minus 1 if they filtered out those not reporting symptoms*), almost all of which will be empty. Should the low-frequency columns be removed? This is not as controversial as you think, because implicitly both Bart and Nils already dropped all empty combinations!

 

Data and Code

Kieran Healy left a comment on the last post, and you can find both the data (thank you!) and some R code for UpSet charts at his blog.

Also, Nils has a Shiny app on Github.

 

(*) One must be very careful about what “users” are being represented. They form a tiny subset of users of the Symptom Tracker app, just those who have previously taken a diagnostic test and have self-reported at least one symptom. I have separately commented on the analyses of this dataset by the team behind the app. The first post discusses their analytical methods, the second post examines how they pre-processed the data, and a future post will describe the data collection practices. For the purpose of this blog post, I’ll ignore any data issues.

(#) Bart’s chart is conceptual because some of the columns of dots are repeated, and there is one column without fills, which should have been removed by a pre-processing step applied by the research team.

The epidemic of simple comparisons

Another day, another Twitter user sent a sloppy chart featured on TV news. This CNN graphic comes from Hugo K. by way of Kevin T.

And it's another opportunity to apply the self-sufficiency test.

Like before, I removed the data printed on the graphic. In reading this chart, we like to know the number of U.S. reported cases of coronavirus relative to China, and Italy relative to the U.S.

So, our eyes trace these invisible lines:

U.S. cases are roughly two-thirds of China while Italian cases are 90% of U.S.

That's what the visual elements, the columns, are telling us. But it's fake news. Here is the chart with the data:

The counts of reported cases in all three countries were neck and neck around this time.

What this quick exercise shows is that anyone who correctly reads this chart is reading the data off the chart, and ignoring the contradictionary message sent by the relative column heights. Thus, the visual elements are not self-sufficient in conveying the message.

***

In a Trifecta Checkup, I'd be most concerned about the D corner. The naive comparison of these case counts is an epidemic of its own. It sometimes leads to poor decisions that can exacerbate the public-health problems. See this post on my sister blog.

The difference in case counts between different countries (or regions or cities or locales) is not a direct measure of the difference in coronavirus spread in these places! This is because there are many often-unobserved factors that will explain most if not all of the differences.

After a lot of work by epidemiologists, medical researchers, statisticians and the likes, we now realize that different places conduct different numbers of tests. No test, no positive. The U.S. has been slow to get testing ramped up.

Less understood is the effect of testing selection. Consider the U.S. where it is still hard to get tested. Only those who meet a list of criteria are eligible. Imagine an alternative reality in which the U.S. conducted the same number of tests but instead of selecting most likely infected people to be tested, we test a random sample of people. The incidence of the virus in a random sample is much lower than in the severely infected, therefore, in this new reality, the number of positives would be lower despite equal numbers of tests.

That's for equal number of tests. If test kits are readily available, then a targeted (triage) testing strategy will under-count cases since mild cases or asymptomatic infections escape attention. (See my Wired column for problems with triage.)

To complicate things even more, in most countries, the number of tests and the testing selection have changed over time so a cumulative count statistic obscures those differences.

Beside testing, there are a host of other factors that affect reported case counts. These are less talked about now but eventually will be.

Different places have different population densities. A lot of cases in a big city and an equal number of cases in a small town do not signify equal severity.  Clearly, the situation in the latter is more serious.

Because the virus affects age groups differently, a direct comparison of the case counts without adjusting for age is also misleading. The number of deaths of 80-year-olds in a college town is low not because the chance of dying from COVID-19 is lower there than in a retirement community; it's low because 80-year-olds are a small proportion of the population.

Next, the cumulative counts ignore which stage of the "epi curve" these countries are at. The following chart can replace most of the charts you're inundated with by the media:

(I found the chart here.)

An epi curve traces the time line of a disease outbreak. Every location is expected to move through stages, with cases reaching a peak and eventually the number of newly recovered will exceed the number of newly infected.

Notice that China, Italy and the US occupy different stages of this curve.  It's proper to compare U.S. to China and Italy when they were at a similar early phase of their respective epi curve.

In addition, any cross-location comparison should account for how reliable the data sources are, and the different definitions of a "case" in different locations.

***

Finally, let's consider the Question posed by the graphic designer. It is the morbid question: which country is hit the worst by coronavirus?

This is a Type DV chart. It's got a reasonable question, but the data require a lot more work to adjust for the list of biases. The visual design is hampered by the common mistake of not starting columns at zero.

 

Graphing the economic crisis of Covid-19

My friend Ray Vella at The Conference Board has a few charts up on their coronavirus website. TCB is a trusted advisor and consultant to large businesses and thus is a good place to learn how the business community is thinking about this crisis.

I particularly like the following chart:

This puts the turmoil in the stock market in perspective. We are roughly tracking the decline of the Great Recession of the late 2000s. It's interesting that 9/11 caused very mild gyrations in the S&P index compared to any of the other events. 

The chart uses an index with value 100 at Day 0. Day 0 is defined by the trigger event for each crisis. About three weeks into the current crisis, the S&P has lost over 30% of its value.

The device of a gray background for the bottom half of the chart is surprisingly effective.

***

Here is a chart showing the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on different sectors.

So the full-service restaurant industry is a huge employer. Restaurants employ 7-8 times more people than airlines. Airlines employ about the same numbers of people as "beverage bars" (which I suppose is the same as "bars" which apparently is different from "drinking places"). Bars employ 7 times more people than "Cafeterias, etc.".

The chart describes where the jobs are, and which sectors they believe will be most impacted. It's not clear yet how deeply these will be impacted. Being in NYC, the complete shutdown is going to impact 100% of these jobs in certain sectors like bars, restaurants and coffee shops.

Proportions and rates: we are no dupes

Reader Lucia G. sent me this chart, from Ars Technica's FAQ about the coronavirus:

She notices something wrong with the axis.

The designer took the advice not to make a dual axis, but didn't realize that the two metrics are not measured on the same scale even though both are expressed as percentages.

The blue bars, labeled "cases", is a distribution of cases by age group. The sum of the blue bars should be 100 percent.

The orange bars show fatality rates by age group. Each orange bar's rate is based on the number of cases in that age group. The sum of the orange bars will not add to 100 percent.

In general, the rates will have much lower values than the proportions. At least that should be the case for viruses that are not extremely fatal.

This is what the 80 and over section looks like.

It is true that fatality rate (orange) is particularly high for the elderly while this age group accounts for less than 5 percent of total cases (blue). However, the cases that are fatal, which inhabit the orange bar, must be a subset of the total cases for 80 and over, which are shown in the blue bar. Conceptually, the orange bar should be contained inside the blue bar. So, it's counter-intuitive that the blue bar is so much shorter than the orange bar.

The following chart fixes this issue. It reveals the structure of the data, Total cases are separated by age group, then within each age group, a proportion of the cases are fatal.

This chart also shows that most patients recover in every age group. (This is only approximately true as some of the cases may not have been discharged yet.)

***

This confusion of rates and proportions reminds me of something about exit polls I just wrote about the other day on the sister blog.

When the media make statements about trends in voter turnout rate in the primary elections, e.g. when they assert that youth turnout has not increased, their evidence is from exit polls, which can measure only the distribution of voters by age group. Exit polls do not and cannot measure the turnout rate, which is the proportion of registered (or eligible) voters in the specific age group who voted.

Like the coronavirus data, the scales of these two metrics are different even though they are both percentages: the turnout rate is typically a number between 30 and 70 percent, and summing the rates across all age groups will exceed 100 percent many times over. Summing the proportions of voters across all age groups should be 100 percent, and no more.

Changes in the proportion of voters aged 18-29 and changes in the turnout rate of people aged 18-29 are not the same thing. The former is affected by the turnout of all age groups while the latter is a clean metric affected only by 18 to 29-years-old.

Basically, ignore pundits who use exit polls to comment on turnout trends. No matter how many times they repeat their nonsense, proportions and rates are not to be confused. Which means, ignore comments on turnout trends because the only data they've got come from exit polls which don't measure rates.

 

P.S. Here is some further explanation of my chart, as a response to a question from Enrico B. on Twitter.

The chart can be thought of as two distributions, one for cases (gray) and one for deaths (red). Like this:

The side-by-side version removes the direct visualization of the fatality rate within each age group. To understand fatality rate requires someone to do math in their head. Readers can qualitatively assess that for the 80 and over, they accounted for 3 percent of cases but also about 21 percent of deaths. People aged 70 to 79 however accounted for 9 percent of cases but 30 percent of deaths, etc.

What I did was to scale the distribution of deaths so that they can be compared to the cases. It's like fitting the red distribution inside the gray distribution. Within each age group, the proportion of red against the length of the bar is the fatality rate.

For every 100 cases regardless of age, 3 cases are for people aged 80 and over within which 0.5 are fatal (red).

So, the axis labels are correct. The values are proportions of total cases, although as the designer of the chart, I hope people are paying attention more to the proportion of red, as opposed to the units.

What might strike people as odd is that the biggest red bar does not appear against 80 and above. We might believe it's deadlier the older you are. That's because on an absolute scale, more people aged 70-79 died than those 80 and above. The absolute deaths is the product of the proportion of cases and the fatality rate. That's really a different story from the usual plot of fatality rates by age group. In those charts, we "control" for the prevalence of cases. If every age group were infected in the same frequency, then COVID-19 does kill more 80 and over.

 

 

 

Comparing chance of death of coronavirus and flu

The COVID-19 charts are proving one thing. When the topic of a dataviz is timely and impactful, readers will study the graphics and ask questions. I've been sent some of these charts lately, and will be featuring them here.

A former student saw this chart from Business Insider (link) and didn't like it.

My initial reaction was generally positive. It's clear the chart addresses a comparison between death rates of the flu and COVID19, an important current question. The side-by-side panel is effective at allowing such a comparison. The column charts look decent, and there aren't excessive gridlines.

Sure, one sees a few simple design fixes, like removing the vertical axis altogether (since the entire dataset has already been printed). I'd also un-slant the age labels.

***

I'd like to discuss some subtler improvements.

A primary challenge is dealing with the different definitions of age groups across the two datasets. While the side-by-side column charts prompt readers to go left-right, right-left in comparing death rates, it's not easy to identify which column to compare to which. This is not fixable in the datasets because the organizations that compile them define their own age groups.

Also, I prefer to superimpose the death rates on the same chart, using something like a dot plot rather than a column chart. This makes the comparison even easier.

Here is a revised visualization:

The contents of this chart raise several challenges to public health officials. Clearly, hospital resources should be preferentially offered to older patients. But young people could be spreading the virus among the community.

Caution is advised as the data for COVID19 suffers from many types of inaccuracies, as outlined here.

It's impossible to understand Super Tuesday, this chart says

Twitter people are talking about this chart, from NPR (link):

This was published on Wednesday after Super Tuesday, the day on which multiple states held their primary elections. On the Democratic side, something like a third of the delegates were up for grabs (although as the data below this chart shows, a big chunk of the delegates, mostly from California and Texas, have yet to be assigned to a candidate as they were still counting votes.)

Here, I hovered over the Biden line, trying to decipher the secret code in these lines:

I have to say I failed. Biden won 6 delegates on Feb 3, 9 on Feb 22, 39 on Feb 29, and 512 on Mar 3. I have no idea how those numbers led to this line!

***

Here is what happened so far in the Democratic primary:

The key tradeoff the designer has to make here is the relative importance of the timeline and the total count. In this chart, it's easiest to compare the total count across candidates as of the Wednesday morning, then to see how each candidate accumulates the delegates over the first five contest days. It takes a little more effort to see who's ahead after each contest day. And it is almost impossible to see the spacing of the contest days over the calendar.

I don't use stacked bar charts often but this chart form makes clear the cumulative counts over time so it's appropriate here.

Also, the as-yet-unassigned delegates is a big part of the story and needs to be visualized.

 

P.S. See comment below. There was a bug in the code and they fixed the line chart.

So, some of the undecided delegates have been awarded and comparing the two charts, it appears that the gap went down from 105 to 76. Still over 150 delegates not assigned.

 

Bad data leave chart hanging by the thread

IGNITE National put out a press release saying that Gen Z white men are different from all other race-gender groups because they are more likely to be or lean Republican. The evidence is in this chart:

Or is it?

Following our Trifecta Checkup framework (link), let's first look at the data. White men is the bottom left group. Democratic = 42%, Independent = 28%, Republican = 48%. That's a total of 118%. Unfortunately, this chart construction error erases the message. We don't know which of the three columns were incorrectly sized, or perhaps the data were incorrectly weighted so that the error is spread out between the three columns.

But the story of the graphic is hanging by the thread - the gap between Democratic and Republican lean amongst white men is 6 percent, which is smaller than the data error of 10 percent. I sent them a tweet asking for a correction. Will post the corrected version if they respond.

Update: The thread didn't break. They replied quickly and issued the following corrected chart:

Now, the data for white men are: Democratic = 35%, Independent = 22%; Republican = 40%. Roughly 7% shift for each party affilitation so they may have just started the baseline at the wrong level when inverting the columns.

***

The Visual design also has some problems. I am not a fan of inverting columns. In fact, column inversion may be the root of the error above.

Let me zoom in on the white men columns. (see right)

Without looking at the legend, can you guess which color is Democratic, Independent or Republican? Go ahead and take your best guess.

For me, I think red is Republican (by convention), then white is Independent (a neutral color) which means yellow is Democratic.

Here is the legend:

So I got the yellow and white reversed. And that is another problem with the visual design. For a chart that shows two-party politics in the U.S., there is really no good reason to deviate from the red-blue convention. The color for Independents doesn't matter since it would be understood that the third color would represent them.

If the red-blue convention were followed, readers do not need to consult the legend.

***

In my Long Read article at DataJournalism.com, I included an "unspoken rule" about color selection: use the natural color mapping whenever possible. Go here to read about this and other rules.

The chart breaks another one of the unspoken conventions. When making a legend, place it near the top of the chart. Readers need to know the color mapping before they can understand the chart.

In addition, you want the reader's eyes to read the legend in the same way they read the columns. The columns goes left to right from Democratic to Independent to Republican. The legend should do the same!

***

Here is a quick re-do that fixes the visual issues (except the data error). It's an Excel chart but it doesn't have to be bad.

 

Too many colors on a chart is bad, but why?

The following chart is bad, but how so?

The chart is annoying because of the misuse of colors.

What is the purpose of the multiple colors used in this chart? It's not encoding any data. Colors are used here to differentiate one bar from its two neighbors. Or perhaps to make the chart more "appealing".

The reason why the coloring scheme backfires is that readers may look for meaning in the colors. What's common between Iceland, United States and Germany for them to be assigned green? What about Japan, New Zealand, Spain and France, all of which shown yellow?

The readers' instinct is driven by a set of unspoken rules that govern the production of data visualization. Specifically, the rule here is: color differences reflect data differences. When such a rule is violated, the reader is misled and confused.

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For more about this rule, other rules related to making bar charts, and other other rules for making data graphics, please read my Long Read article, here.