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.

Habit-busting designs don't work

The design changes that most frustrate users are those that bust their habits.

Case in point. Apple re-designed the bottom navigator of the iphone mail app. See what it looked like before and what it looks like today:

Notice how the 2nd slot from the bottom right used to be for replying, and after the re-design, it has become the button for deleting. So when I intended to reply to a message, my finger instinctively presses that 2nd button and now, instead of replying, the message gets deleted!

In the last few years, my finger hit that button thousands of times whenever the brain said to reply. Now, it's really hard to change this habit. I kept having to undo the delete. It's frustrating beyond belief.

This also shows the habit is in the muscle memory, and I'm no longer paying attention to the visual icon. A more direct dataviz analogy is when you belatedly discovered that the horizontal axis in a line chart isn't representing time because you didn't read the axis labels.

***

A similar thing happened inside an elevator (lift) recently.

Most elevator panels place the Door Open and Door Close buttons side by side. Typically, the Door Open is on the left and the Door Close is on the right.

This particular elevator panel has the Door Open button on top, and Door Close at the bottom, laid out vertically. To the right of the Door Open button is the Alarm button! So I sounded the Alarm when I intended the doors to close.

(I didn't take a photo at the time. The figure on the right is a rough sketch of what the panel looked like.)

I bet the alarm is pressed multiple times a day by mistake.

Bubble charts, ratios and proportionality

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal about a challenger to the dominant weedkiller, Roundup, contains a nice selection of graphics. (Dicamba is the up-and-comer.)

The change in usage of three brands of weedkillers is rendered as a small-multiples of choropleth maps. This graphic displays geographical and time changes simultaneously.

The staircase chart shows weeds have become resistant to Roundup over time. This is considered a weakness in the Roundup business.

***

In this post, my focus is on the chart at the bottom, which shows complaints about Dicamba by state in 2019. This is a bubble chart, with the bubbles sorted along the horizontal axis by the acreage of farmland by state.

Below left is a more standard version of such a chart, in which the bubbles are allowed to overlap. (I only included the bubbles that were labeled in the original chart).

The WSJ’s twist is to use the vertical spacing to avoid overlapping bubbles. The vertical axis serves a design perogative and does not encode data.  

I’m going to stick with the more traditional overlapping bubbles here – I’m getting to a different matter.

***

The question being addressed by this chart is: which states have the most serious Dicamba problem, as revealed by the frequency of complaints? The designer recognizes that the amount of farmland matters. One should expect the more acres, the more complaints.

Let's consider computing directly the number of complaints per million acres.

The resulting chart (shown below right) – while retaining the design – gives a wholly different feeling. Arkansas now owns the largest bubble even though it has the least acreage among the included states. The huge Illinois bubble is still large but is no longer a loner.

Now return to the original design for a moment (the chart on the left). In theory, this should work in the following manner: if complaints grow purely as a function of acreage, then the bubbles should grow proportionally from left to right. The trouble is that proportional areas are not as easily detected as proportional lengths.

The pair of charts below depict made-up data in which all states have 30 complaints for each million acres of farmland. It’s not intuitive that the bubbles on the left chart are growing proportionally.

Now if you look at the right chart, which shows the relative metric of complaints per million acres, it’s impossible not to notice that all bubbles are the same size.

Conceptualizing a chart using Trifecta: a practical example

In response to the reader who left a comment asking for ideas for improving the "marginal abatements chart" that was discussed here, I thought it might be helpful to lay out the process I go through when conceptualizing a chart. (Just a reminder, here is the chart we're dealing with.)

First, I'm very concerned about the long program names. I see their proper placement in a horizontal orientation as a hard constraint on the design. I'd reject every design that displays the text vertically, at an angle, or hides it behind some hover effect, or abbreviates or abridges the text.

Second, I strongly suggest re-thinking the "cost-effectiveness" metric on the vertical axis. Flipping the sign of this metric makes a return-on-investment-type metric, which is much more intuitive. Just to reiterate a prior point, it feels odd to be selecting more negative projects before more positive projects.

Third, I'd like to decide what metrics to place on the two axes. There are three main possibilities: a) benefits (that is, the average annual emissions abatement shown on the horizontal axis currently), b) costs, and c) some function that ties together costs and benefits (currently, this design uses cost per unit benefit, and calls it cost effectivness but there are a variety of similar metrics that can be defined).

For each of these metrics, there is a secondary choice. I can use the by-project value or the cumulative value. The cumulative value is dependent on a selection order, in this case, determined by the criterion of selecting from the most cost-effective program to the least (regardless of project size or any other criteria).

This is where I'd bring in the Trifecta Checkup framework (see here for a guide).

The decision of which metrics to use on the axes means I'm operating in the "D" corner. But this decision must be made with respect to the "Q" corner, thus the green arrow between the two. Which two metrics are the most relevant depends on what we want the chart to accomplish. That in turn depends on the audience and what specific question we are addressing for them.

Fourth, if the purpose of the chart is exploratory - that is to say, we use it to guide decision-makers in choosing a subset of programs, then I would want to introduce an element of interactivity. Imagine an interface that allows the user to move programs in and out of the chart, while the chart updates itself to compute the total costs and total benefits.

This last point ties together the entire Trifacta Checkup framework (link). The Question being exploratory in nature suggests a certain way of organizing and analyzing the Data as well as a Visual form that facilitates interacting with the information.

 

 

This chart tells you how rich is rich - if you can read it

Via twitter, John B. sent me the following YouGov chart (link) that he finds difficult to read:

The title is clear enough: the higher your income, the higher you set the bar.

When one then moves from the title to the chart, one gets misdirected. The horizontal axis shows pound values, so the axis naturally maps to "the higher your income". But it doesn't. Those pound values are the "cutoff" values - the line between "rich" and "not rich". Even after one realizes this detail, the axis  presents further challenges: the cutoff values are arbitrary numbers such as "45,001" sterling; and these continuous numbers are treated as discrete categories, with irregular intervals between each category.

There is some very interesting and hard to obtain data sitting behind this chart but the visual form suppresses them. The best way to understand this dataset is to first think about each income group. Say, people who make between 20 to 30 thousand sterling a year. Roughly 10% of these people think "rich" starts at 25,000. Forty percent of this income group think "rich" start at 40,000.

For each income group, we have data on Z percent think "rich" starts at X. I put all of these data points into a heatmap, like this:

Technical note: in order to restore the horizontal axis to a continuous scale, you can take the discrete data from the original chart, then fit a smoothed curve through those points, and finally compute the interpolated values for any income level using the smoothing model.

***

There are some concerns about the survey design. It's hard to get enough samples for higher-income people. This is probably why the highest income segment starts at 50,000. But notice that 50,ooo is around the level at which lower-income people consider "rich". So, this survey is primarily about how low-income people perceive "rich" people.

The curve for the highest income group is much straighter and smoother than the other lines - that's because it's really the average of a number of curves (for each 10,000 sterling segment).

 

P.S. The YouGov tweet that publicized the small-multiples chart shown above links to a page that no longer contains the chart. They may have replaced it due to feedback.

 

 

How to read this cost-benefit chart, and why it is so confusing

Long-time reader Antonio R. found today's chart hard to follow, and he isn't alone. It took two of us multiple emails and some Web searching before we think we "got it".

 

Antonio first encountered the chart in a book review (link) of Hal Harvey et. al, Designing Climate Solutions. It addresses the general topic of costs and benefits of various programs to abate CO2 emissions. The reviewer praised the "wealth of graphics [in the book] which present complex information in visually effective formats." He presented the above chart as evidence, and described its function as:

policy-makers can focus on the areas which make the most difference in emissions, while also being mindful of the cost issues that can be so important in getting political buy-in.

(This description is much more informative than the original chart title, which states "The policy cost curve shows the cost-effectiveness and emission reduction potential of different policies.")

Spend a little time with the chart now before you read the discussion below.

Warning: this is a long read but well worth it.

 

***

 

If your experience is anything like ours, scraps of information flew at you from different parts of the chart, and you had a hard time piecing together a story.

What are the reasons why this data graphic is so confusing?

Everyone recognizes that this is a column chart. For a column chart, we interpret the heights of the columns so we look first at the vertical axis. The axis title informs us that the height represents "cost effectiveness" measured in dollars per million metric tons of CO2. In a cost-benefit sense, that appears to mean the cost to society of obtaining the benefit of reducing CO2 by a given amount.

That's how far I went before hitting the first roadblock.

For environmental policies, opponents frequently object to the high price of implementation. For example, we can't have higher fuel efficiency in cars because it would raise the price of gasoline too much. Asking about cost-effectiveness makes sense: a cost-benefit trade-off analysis encapsulates the something-for-something principle. What doesn't follow is that the vertical scale sinks far into the negative. The chart depicts the majority of the emissions abatement programs as having negative cost effectiveness.

What does it mean to be negatively cost-effective? Does it mean society saves money (makes a profit) while also reducing CO2 emissions? Wouldn't those policies - more than half of the programs shown - be slam dunks? Who can object to programs that improve the environment at no cost?

I tabled that thought, and proceeded to the horizontal axis.

I noticed that this isn't a standard column chart, in which the width of the columns is fixed and uneventful. Here, the widths of the columns are varying.

***

In the meantime, my eyes are distracted by the constellation of text labels. The viewing area of this column chart is occupied - at least 50% - by text. These labels tell me that each column represents a program to reduce CO2 emissions.

The dominance of text labels is a feature of this design. For a conventional column chart, the labels are situated below each column. Since the width does not usually carry any data, we tend to keep the columns narrow - Tufte, ever the minimalist, has even advocated reducing columns to vertical lines. That leaves insufficient room for long labels. Have you noticed that government programs hold long titles? It's tough to capture even the outline of a program with fewer than three big words, e.g. "Renewable Portfolio Standard" (what?).

The design solution here is to let the column labels run horizontally. So the graphical element for each program is a vertical column coupled with a horizontal label that invades the territories of the next few programs. Like this:

The horror of this design constraint is fully realized in the following chart, a similar design produced for the state of Oregon (lifted from the Plan Washington webpage listed as a resource below):

In a re-design, horizontal labeling should be a priority.

 

***

Realizing that I've been distracted by the text labels, back to the horizontal axis I went.

This is where I encountered the next roadblock.

The axis title says "Average Annual Emissions Abatement" measured in millions metric tons. The unit matches the second part of the vertical scale, which is comforting. But how does one reconcile the widths of columns with a continuous scale? I was expecting each program to have a projected annual abatement benefit, and those would fall as dots on a line, like this:

Instead, we have line segments sitting on a line, like this:

Think of these bars as the bottom edges of the columns. These line segments can be better compared to each other if structured as a bar chart:

Instead, the design arranges these lines end-to-end.

To unravel this mystery, we go back to the objective of the chart, as announced by the book reviewer. Here it is again:

policy-makers can focus on the areas which make the most difference in emissions, while also being mindful of the cost issues that can be so important in getting political buy-in.

The primary goal of the chart is a decision-making tool for policy-makers who are evaluating programs. Each program has a cost and also a benefit. The cost is shown on the vertical axis and the benefit is shown on the horizontal. The decision-maker will select some subset of these programs based on the cost-benefit analysis. That subset of programs will have a projected total expected benefit (CO2 abatement) and a projected total cost.

By stacking the line segments end to end on top of the horizontal axis, the chart designer elevates the task of computing the total benefits of a subset of programs, relative to the task of learning the benefits of any individual program. Thus, the horizontal axis is better labeled "Cumulative annual emissions abatement".

 

Look at that axis again. Imagine you are required to learn the specific benefit of program titled "Fuel Economy Standards: Cars & SUVs".  

This is impossible to do without pulling out a ruler and a calculator. What the axis labels do tell us is that if all the programs to the left of Fuel Economy Standards: Cars & SUVs were adopted, the cumulative benefits would be 285 million metric tons of CO2 per year. And if Fuel Economy Standards: Cars & SUVs were also implemented, the cumulative benefits would rise to 375 million metric tons.

***

At long last, we have arrived at a reasonable interpretation of the cost-benefit chart.

Policy-makers are considering throwing their support behind specific programs aimed at abating CO2 emissions. Different organizations have come up with different ways to achieve this goal. This goal may even have specific benchmarks; the government may have committed to an international agreement, for example, to reduce emissions by some set amount by 2030. Each candidate abatement program is evaluated on both cost and benefit dimensions. Benefit is given by the amount of CO2 abated. Cost is measured as a "marginal cost," the amount of dollars required to achieve each million metric ton of abatement.

This "marginal abatement cost curve" aids the decision-making. It lines up the programs from the most cost-effective to the least cost-effective. The decision-maker is presumed to prefer a more cost-effective program than a less cost-effective program. The chart answers the following question: for any given subset of programs (so long as we select them left to right contiguously), we can read off the cumulative amount of CO2 abated.

***

There are still more limitations of the chart design.

• We can't directly read off the cumulative cost of the selected subset of programs because the vertical axis is not cumulative. The cumulative cost turns out to be the total area of all the columns that correspond to the selected programs. (Area is height x width, which is cost per benefit multiplied by benefit, which leaves us with the cost.) Unfortunately, it takes rulers and calculators to compute this total area.
  
  
• We have presumed that policy-makers will make the Go-No-go decision based on cost effectiveness alone. This point of view has already been contradicted. Remember the mystery around negatively cost-effective programs - their existence shows that some programs are stalled even when they reduce emissions in addition to making money!
  
  
• Since many, if not most, programs have negative cost-effectiveness (by the way they measured it), I'd flip the metric over and call it profitability (or return on investment). Doing so removes another barrier to our understanding. With the current cost-effectiveness metric, policy-makers are selecting the "negative" programs before the "positive" programs. It makes more sense to select the "positive" programs before the "negative" ones!

***

In a Trifecta Checkup (guide), I rate this chart Type V. The chart has a great purpose, and the design reveals a keen sense of the decision-making process. It's not a data dump for sure. In addition, an impressive amount of data gathering and analysis - and synthesis - went into preparing the two data series required to construct the chart. (Sure, for something so subjective and speculative, the analysis methodology will inevitably be challenged by wonks.) Those two data series are reasonable measures for the stated purpose of the chart.

The chart form, though, has various shortcomings, as shown here.  

***

In our email exchange, Antonio and I found the Plan Washington website useful. This is where we learned that this chart is called the marginal abatement cost curve.

Also, the consulting firm McKinsey is responsible for popularizing this chart form. They have published this long report that explains even more of the analysis behind constructing this chart, for those who want further details.

Women workers taken for a loop or four

I was drawn to the following chart in Business Insider because of the calendar metaphor. (The accompanying article is here.)

Sometimes, the calendar helps readers grasp concepts faster but I'm afraid the usage here slows us down.

The underlying data consist of just four numbers: the wage gaps between race and gender in the U.S., considered simply from an aggregate median personal income perspective. The analyst adopts the median annual salary of a white male worker as a baseline. Then, s/he imputes the number of extra days that others must work to attain the same level of income. For example, the median Asian female worker must work 64 extra days (at her daily salary level) to match the white guy's annual pay. Meanwhile, Hispanic female workers must work 324 days extra.

There are a host of reasons why the calendar metaphor backfired.

Firstly, it draws attention to an uncomfortable detail of the analysis - which papers over the fact that weekends or public holidays are counted as workdays. The coloring of the boxes compounds this issue. (And the designer also got confused and slipped up when applying the purple color for Hispanic women.)

Secondly, the calendar focuses on Year 2 while Year 1 lurks in the background - white men have to work to get that income (roughly $46,000 in 2017 according to the Census Bureau).

Thirdly, the calendar view exposes another sore point around the underlying analysis. In reality, the white male workers are continuing to earn wages during Year 2.

The realism of the calendar clashes with the hypothetical nature of the analysis.

***

One can just use a bar chart, comparing the number of extra days needed. The calendar design can be considered a set of overlapping bars, wrapped around the shape of a calendar.

The staid bars do not bring to life the extra toil - the message is that these women have to work harder to get the same amount of pay. This led me to a different metaphor - the white men got to the destination in a straight line but the women must go around loops (extra days) before reaching the same endpoint.

While the above is a rough sketch, I made sure that the total length of the lines including the loops roughly matches the total number of days the women needed to work to earn $46,000.

***

The above discussion focuses solely on the V(isual) corner of the Trifecta Checkup, but this data visualization is also interesting from the D(ata) perspective. Statisticians won't like such a simple analysis that ignores, among other things, the different mix of jobs and industries underlying these aggregate pay figures.

Now go to my other post on the sister (book) blog for a discussion of the underlying analysis.

 

 

Powerful photos visualizing housing conditions in Hong Kong

I was going to react to Alberto's post about the New York Times's article about economic inequality in Hong Kong, which is proposed as one origin to explain the current protest movement. I agree that the best graphic in this set is the "photoviz" showing the "coffins" or "cages" that many residents live in, because of the population density. 

Then I searched the archives, and found this old post from 2015 which is the perfect response to it. What's even better, that post was also inspired by Alberto.

The older post featured a wonderful campaign by human rights organization Society for Community Organization that uses photoviz to draw attention to the problem of housing conditions in Hong Kong. They organized a photography exhibit on this theme in 2014. They then updated the exhibit in 2016.

Here is one of the iconic photos by Benny Lam:

I found more coverage of Benny's work here. There is also a book that we can flip on Vimeo.

In 2017, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) published drone footage showing the outside view of the apartment buildings.

***

What's missing is the visual comparison to the luxury condos where the top 1 percent live. For these, one can  visit the real estate sites, such as Sotheby's. Here is their "12 luxury homes for sales" page.

Another comparison: a 1000 sq feet apartment that sits between those extremes. The photo by John Butlin comes from SCMP's Post Magazine's feature on the apartment:

***

Also check out my review of Alberto's fantastic, recent book, How Charts Lie.

 

 

What is a bad chart?

In the recent issue of Madolyn Smith’s Conversations with Data newsletter hosted by DataJournalism.com, she discusses “bad charts,” featuring submissions from several dataviz bloggers, including myself.

What is a “bad chart”? Based on this collection of curated "bad charts", it is not easy to nail down “bad-ness”. The common theme is the mismatch between the message intended by the designer and the message received by the reader, a classic error of communication. How such mismatch arises depends on the specific example. I am able to divide the “bad charts” into two groups: charts that are misinterpreted, and charts that are misleading.

 

Charts that are misinterpreted

The Causes of Death entry, submitted by Alberto Cairo, is a “well-designed” chart that requires “reading the story where it is inserted and the numerous caveats.” So readers may misinterpret the chart if they do not also partake the story at Our World in Data which runs over 1,500 words not including the appendix.

The map of Canada, submitted by Highsoft, highlights in green the provinces where the majority of residents are members of the First Nations. The “bad” is that readers may incorrectly “infer that a sizable part of the Canadian population is First Nations.”

In these two examples, the graphic is considered adequate and yet the reader fails to glean the message intended by the designer.

 

Charts that are misleading

Two fellow bloggers, Cole Knaflic and Jon Schwabish, offer the advice to start bars at zero (here's my take on this rule). The “bad” is the distortion introduced when encoding the data into the visual elements.

The Color-blindness pictogram, submitted by Severino Ribecca, commits a similar faux pas. To compare the rates among men and women, the pictograms should use the same baseline.

In these examples, readers who correctly read the charts nonetheless leave with the wrong message. (We assume the designer does not intend to distort the data.) The readers misinterpret the data without misinterpreting the graphics.

 

Using the Trifecta Checkup

In the Trifecta Checkup framework, these problems are second-level problems, represented by the green arrows linking up the three corners. (Click here to learn more about using the Trifecta Checkup.)

The visual design of the Causes of Death chart is not under question, and the intended message of the author is clearly articulated in the text. Our concern is that the reader must go outside the graphic to learn the full message. This suggests a problem related to the syncing between the visual design and the message (the QV edge).

By contrast, in the Color Blindness graphic, the data are not under question, nor is the use of pictograms. Our concern is how the data got turned into figurines. This suggests a problem related to the syncing between the data and the visual (the DV edge).

***

When you complain about a misleading chart, or a chart being misinterpreted, what do you really mean? Is it a visual design problem? a data problem? Or is it a syncing problem between two components?

The Periodic Table, a challenge in information organization

Reader Chris P. points me to this article about the design of the Periodic Table. I then learned that 2019 is the “International Year of the Periodic Table,” according to the United Nations.

Here is the canonical design of the Periodic Table that science students are familiar with.

(Source: Wikipedia.)

The Periodic Table is an exercise of information organization and display. It's about adding structure to over 100 elements, so as to enhance comprehension and lookup. The canonical tabular design has columns and rows. The columns (Groups) impose a primary classification; the rows (Periods) provide a secondary classification. The elements also follow an aggregate order, which is traced by reading from top left to bottom right. The row structure makes clear the "periodicity" of the elements: the "period" of recurrence is not constant, tending to increase with the heavier elements at the bottom.

As with most complex datasets, these elements defy simple organization, due to a curse of dimensionality. The general goal is to put the similar elements closer together. Similarity can be defined in an infinite number of ways, such as chemical, physical or statistical properties. The canonical design, usually attributed to Russian chemist Mendeleev, attained its status because the community accepted his organizing principles, that is, his definitions of similarity (subsequently modified).

***

Of interest, there is a list of unsettled issues. According to Wikipedia, the most common arguments concern:

• Hydrogen: typically shown as a member of Group 1 (first column), some argue that it doesn’t belong there since it is a gas not a metal. It is sometimes placed in Group 17 (halogens), where it forms a nice “triad” with fluorine and chlorine. Other designers just float hydrogen up top.
• Helium: typically shown as a member of Group 18 (rightmost column), the  halogens noble gases, it may also be placed in Group 2.
• Mercury: usually found in Group 12, some argue that it is not a metal like cadmium and zinc.
• Group 3: other than the first two elements , there are various voices about how to place the other elements in Group 3. In particular, the pairs of lanthanum / actinium and lutetium / lawrencium are sometimes shown in the main table, sometimes shown in the ‘f-orbital’ sub-table usually placed below the main table.

***

Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to re-design the Periodic table. Some of these are featured in the article that Chris sent me (link).

I checked how these alternative designs deal with those unsettled issues. The short answer is they don't settle the issues.

Wide Table (Janet)

The key change is to remove the separation between the main table and the f-orbital (pink) section shown below, as a "footnote". This change clarifies the periodicity of the elements, especially the elongating periods as one moves down the table. This form is also called "long step".

As a tradeoff, this table requires more space and has an awkward aspect ratio.

In this version of the wide table, the designer chooses to stack lutetium / lawrencium in Group 3 as part of the main table. Other versions place lanthanum / actinium in Group 3 as part of the main table. There are even versions that leave Group 3 with two elements.

Hydrogen, helium and mercury retain their conventional positions.

 

Spiral Design (Hyde)

There are many attempts at spiral designs. Here is one I found on this tumblr:

The spiral leverages the correspondence between periodic and circular. It is visually more pleasing than a tabular arrangement. But there is a tradeoff. Because of the increasing "diameter" from inner to outer rings, the inner elements are visually constrained compared to the outer ones.

In these spiral diagrams, the designer solves the aspect-ratio problem by creating local loops, sometimes called peninsulas. This is analogous to the footnote table solution, and visually distorts the longer periodicity of the heavier elements.

For Hyde's diagram, hydrogen is floated, helium is assigned to Group 2, and mercury stays in Group 12.

 

Racetrack

I also found this design on the same tumblr, but unattributed. It may have come from Life magazine.

It's a variant of the spiral. Instead of peninsulas, the designer squeezes the f-orbital section under Group 3, so this is analogous to the wide table solution.

The circular diagrams convey the sense of periodic return but the wide table displays the magnitudes more clearly.

This designer places hydrogen in group 18 forming a triad with fluorine and chlorine. Helium is in Group 17 and mercury in the usual Group 12 .

 

Cartogram (Sheehan)

This version is different.

The designer chooses a statistical property (abundance) as the primary organizing principle. The key insight is that the lighter elements in the top few rows are generally more abundant - thus more important in a sense. The cartogram reveals a key weakness of the spiral diagrams that draw the reader's attention to the outer (heavier) elements.

Because of the distorted shapes, the cartogram form obscures much of the other data. In terms of the unsettled issues, hydrogen and helium are placed in Groups 1 and 2. Mercury is in Group 12. Group 3 is squeezed inside the main table rather than shown below.

 

Network

The centerpiece of the article Chris sent me is a network graph.

This is a complete redesign, de-emphasizing the periodicity. It's a result of radically changing the definition of similarity between elements. One barrier when introducing entirely new displays is the tendency of readers to expect the familiar.

***

I found the following articles useful when researching this post:

The Conversation

Royal Chemistry Society