Reading this chart won't take as long as withdrawing troops from Afghanistan

Art sent me the following Economist chart, noting how hard it is to understand. I took a look, and agreed. It's an example of a visual representation that takes more time to comprehend than the underlying data.

The chart presents responses to 3 questions on a survey. For each question, the choices are Approve, Disapprove, and "Neither" (just picking a word since I haven't seen the actual survey question). The overall approval/disapproval rates are presented, and then broken into two subgroups (Democrats and Republicans).

The first hurdle is reading the scale. Because the section from 75% to 100% has been removed, we are left with labels 0, 25, 50, 75, which do not say percentages unless we've consumed the title and subtitle. The Economist style guide places the units of data in the subtitle instead of on
the axis itself.

Our attention is drawn to the thick lines, which represent the differences between approval and disapproval rates. These differences are signed: it matters whether the proportion approving is higher or lower than the proportion disapproving. This means the data are encoded in the order of the dots plus the length of the line segment between them.

The two bottom rows of the Afghanistan question demonstrates this mental challenge. Our brains have to process the following visual cues:

1) the two lines are about the same lengths

2) the Republican dots are shifted to the right by a little

3) the colors of the dots are flipped

What do they all mean?

A chart runs in trouble when you need a paragraph to explain how to read it.

It's sometimes alright to make complicated data visualization that illustrates complicated concepts. What justifies it is the payoff. I wrote about the concept of return on effort in data visualization here.

The payoff for this chart escaped me. Take the Democratic response to troop withdrawal. About 3/4 of Democrats approve while 15% disapprove. The thick line says 60% more Democrats approve than disapprove.

***

Here, I show the full axis, and add a 50% reference line

Small edits but they help visualize "half of", "three quarters of".

***

Next, I switch to the more conventional stacked bars.

This format reveals some of the hidden data on the chart - the proportion answering neither approve/disapprove, and neither yes/no.

On the stacked bars visual, the proportions are counted from both ends while in the dot plot above, the proportions are measured from the left end only.

***

Read all my posts about Economist charts here

 

Dreamy Hawaii

I really enjoyed this visual story by ProPublica and Honolulu Star-Advertiser about the plight of beaches in Hawaii (link).

The story begins with a beautiful invitation:

This design reminds me of Vimeo's old home page. (It no longer looks like this today but this screenshot came from when I was the data guy there.) In both cases, the images are not static but moving.

The tour de force of this visual story is an annotated walk along the Lanikai Beach. Here is a snapshot at one of the stops:

This shows a particular homeowner who, according to documents, was permitted to rebuild a destroyed seawall even though officials were supposed to disallow reconstruction in order to protect beaches from eroding. The property is marked on the map above. The image inside the box is a gif showing waves smashing the seawall.

As the reader scrolls down, the image window runs through a carousel of gifs of houses along the beach. The images are synchronized to the reader's progress along the shore. The narrative makes stops at specific houses at which point a text box pops up to provide color commentary.

***

The erosion crisis is shown in this pair of maps.

There's some fancy work behind the scenes to patch together images, and estimate the boundaries of th beaches.

***

The following map is notable for its simplicity. There are no unnecessary details and labels. We don't need to know the name of every street or a specific restaurant. Removing excess details makes readers focus on the informative parts. 

Clicking on the dots brings up more details.

***

Enjoy the entire story here.

These are the top posts of 2020

It's always very interesting as a writer to look back at a year's of posts and find out which ones were most popular with my readers.

Here are the top posts on Junk Charts from 2020:

How to read this chart about coronavirus risk

This post about a New York Times scatter plot dates from February, a time when many Americans were debating whether Covid-19 was just the flu.

Proportions and rates: we are no dupes

This post about a ArsTechnica chart on the effects of Covid-19 by age is an example of designing the visual to reflect the structure of the data.

When the pie chart is more complex than the data

This post shows a 3D pie chart which is worse than a 2D pie chart.

Twitter people upset with that Covid symptoms diagram

This post discusses some complicated graphics designed to illustrate complicated datasets on Covid-19 symptoms.

Cornell must remove the logs before it reopens in the fall

This post is another warning to think twice before you use log scales.

What is the price of objectivity?

This post turns an "objective" data visualization into a piece of visual story-telling.

The snake pit chart is the best election graphic ever

This post introduces my favorite U.S. presidential election graphic, designed by the FiveThirtyEight team.

***

Here is a list of posts that deserve more attention:

Locating the political center

An example of bringing readers as close to the insights as possible

Visualizing change over time

An example of designing data visualization to reflect the structure of multivariate data

Bloomberg made me digest these graphics slowly

An example of simple and thoughtful graphics

The hidden bad assumption behind most dual-axis time-series charts

Read this before you make a dual-axis chart

Pie chart conventions

Read this before you make a pie chart

***
Looking forward to bring you more content in 2021!

Happy new year.

Convincing charts showing containment measures work

The disorganized nature of U.S.'s response to the coronavirus pandemic has created a sort of natural experiment that allows data journalists to explore important scientific questions, such as the impact of containment measures on cases and hospitalizations. This New York Times article represents the best of such work.

The key finding of the analysis is beautifully captured by this set of scatter plots:

Each dot is a state. The cases (left plot) and hospitalizations (right plot) are plotted against the severity of containment measures for November. The negative correlation is unmistakable: the more containment measures taken, the lower the counts.

There are a few features worth noting.

The severity index came from a group at Oxford, and is a number between 0 and 100. The journalists decided to leave out the numerical labels, instead simply showing More and Fewer. This significantly reduces processing time. Readers won't be able to understand the index values anyway without reading the manual.

The index values are doubly encoded. They are first encoded by the location on the horizontal axis and redundantly encoded on the blue-red scale. Ordinarily, I do not like redundant encoding because the reader might assume a third dimension exists. In this case, I had no trouble with it.

The easiest way to see the effect is to ignore the muddy middle and focus on the two ends of the severity index. Those states with the fewest measures - South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa - are the worst in cases and hospitalizations while those states with the most measures - New York, Hawaii - are among the best. This comparison is similar to what is frequently done in scientific studies, e.g. when they say coffee is good for you, they typically compare heavy drinkers (4 or more cups a day) with non-drinkers, ignoring the moderate and light drinkers.

Notably, there is quite a bit of variability for any level of containment measures - roughly 50 cases per 100,000, and 25 hospitalizations per 100,000. This indicates that containment measures are not sufficient to explain the counts. For example, the hospitalization statistic is affected by the stock of hospital beds, which I assume differ by state.

Whenever we use a scatter plot, we run the risk of xyopia. This chart form invites readers to explain an outcome (y-axis values) using one explanatory variable (on x-axis). There is an assumption that all other variables are unimportant, which is usually false.

***

Because of the variability, the horizontal scale has meaningless precision. The next chart cures this by grouping the states into three categories: low, medium and high level of measures.

This set of charts extends the time window back to March 1. For the designer, this creates a tricky problem - because states adapt their policies over time. As indicated in the subtitle, the grouping is based on the average severity index since March, rather than just November, as in the scatter plots above.

***

The interplay between policy and health indicators is captured by connected scatter plots, of which the Times article included a few examples. Here is what happened in New York:

Up until April, the policies were catching up with the cases. The policies tightened even after the case-per-capita started falling. Then, policies eased a little, and cases started to spike again.

The Note tells us that the containment severity index is time shifted to reflect a two-week lag in effect. So, the case count on May 1 is not paired with the containment severity index of May 1 but of April 15.

***

You can find the full article here.

 

 

 

Bloomberg made me digest these graphics slowly

Ask the experts to name the success metric of good data visualization, and you will receive a dozen answers. The field doesn't have an all-encompassing metric. A useful reference is Andrew Gelman and Antony Urwin (2012) in which they discussed the tradeoff between beautiful and informative, which derives from the familiar tension between art and science.

For a while now, I've been intrigued by metrics that measure "effort". Some years ago, I described the concept of a "return on effort" in this post. Such a metric can be constructed like the dominating financial metric of return on investment. The investment here is an investment of time, of attention. I strongly believe that if the consumer judges a data visualization to be compelling, engaging or  ell constructed, s/he will expend energy to devour it.

Imagine grub you discard after the first bite, compared to the delicious food experienced slowly, savoring every last bit.

I'm writing this post while enjoying the September issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, which focuses on the upcoming U.S. Presidential election. There are various graphics infused into the pages of the magazine. Many of these graphics operate at a level of complexity above what typically show up in magazines, and yet I spent energy learning to understand them. This response, I believe, is what visual designers should aim for.

***

Today, I discuss one example of these graphics, shown on the right. You might be shocked by the throwback style of these graphics. They look like they arrived from decades ago!

Grayscale, simple forms, typewriter font, all caps. Have I gone crazy?

The article argues that a town like Ambridge in Beaver County, Pennslyvania may be pivotal in the November election. The set of graphics provides relevant data to understand this argument.

It's evidence that data visualization does not need whiz-bang modern wizardry to excel.

Let me focus on the boxy charts from the top of the column. These:

These charts solve a headache with voting margin data in the U.S.  We have two dominant political parties so in any given election, the vote share data split into three buckets: Democratic, Republican, and a catch-all category that includes third parties, write-ins, and none of the above. The third category rarely exceeds 5 percent.  A generic pie chart representation looks like this:

Stacked bars have this look:

In using my Trifecta framework (link), the top point is articulating the question. The primary issue here is the voting margin between the winner and the second-runner-up, which is the loser in what is typically a two-horse race. There exist two sub-questions: the vote-share difference between the top two finishers, and the share of vote effectively removed from the pot by the remaining candidates.

Now, take another look at the unusual chart form used by Bloomberg:

The catch-all vote share sits at the bottom while the two major parties split up the top section. This design demonstrates a keen understanding of the context. Consider the typical outcome, in which the top two finishers are from the two major parties. When answering the first sub-question, we can choose the raw vote shares, or the normalized vote shares. Normalizing shifts the base from all candidates to the top two candidates.

The Bloomberg chart addresses both scales. The normalized vote shares can be read directly by focusing only on the top section. In an even two-horse race, the top section is split by half - this holds true regardless of the size of the bottom section.

This is a simple chart that packs a punch.

 

When the pie chart is more complex than the data

The trading house, Charles Schwab, included the following graphic in a recent article:

This graphic is more complicated than the story that it illustrates. The author describes a simple scenario in which an investor divides his investments into stocks, bonds and cash. After a stock crash, the value of the portfolio declines.

The graphic is a 3-D pie chart, in which the data are encoded twice, first in the areas of the sectors and then in the heights of the part-cylinders.

As readers, we perceive the relative volumes of the part-cylinders. Volume is the cross-sectional area (i.e. of the base) multipled by the height. Since each component holds the data, the volumes are proportional to the squares of the data.

Here is a different view of the same data:

This "bumps chart" (also called a slopegraph) shows clearly the only thing that drives the change is the drop in stock prices. Because the author assumes no change in bonds or cash, the drop in the entire portfolio is completely accounted for by the decline in stocks. Of course, this scenario seems patently unrealistic - different investment asset classes tend to be correlated.

***

A cardinal rule of data visualization is that the visual should be less complex than the data.

Designs of two variables: map, dot plot, line chart, table

The New York Times found evidence that the richest segments of New Yorkers, presumably those with second or multiple homes, have exited the Big Apple during the early months of the pandemic. The article (link) is amply assisted by a variety of data graphics.

The first few charts represent different attempts to express the headline message. Their appearance in the same article allows us to assess the relative merits of different chart forms.

First up is the always-popular map.

The advantage of a map is its ease of comprehension. We can immediately see which neighborhoods experienced the greater exoduses. Clearly, Manhattan has cleared out a lot more than outer boroughs.

The limitation of the map is also in view. With the color gradient dedicated to the proportions of residents gone on May 1st, there isn't room to express which neighborhoods are richer. We have to rely on outside knowledge to make the correlation ourselves.

The second attempt is a dot plot.

We may have to take a moment to digest the horizontal axis. It's not time moving left to right but income percentiles. The poorest neighborhoods are to the left and the richest to the right. I'm assuming that these percentiles describe the distribution of median incomes in neighborhoods. Typically, when we see income percentiles, they are based on households, regardless of neighborhoods. (The former are equal-sized segments, unlike the latter.)

This data graphic has the reverse features of the map. It does a great job correlating the drop in proportion of residents at home with the income distribution but it does not convey any spatial information. The message is clear: The residents in the top 10% of New York neighborhoods are much more likely to have left town.

In the following chart, I attempted a different labeling of both axes. It cuts out the need for readers to reverse being home to not being home, and 90th percentile to top 10%.

The third attempt to convey the income--exit relationship is the most successful in my mind. This is a line chart, with time on the horizontal axis.

The addition of lines relegates the dots to the background. The lines show the trend more clearly. If directly translated from the dot plot, this line chart should have 100 lines, one for each percentile. However, the closeness of the top two lines suggests that no meaningful difference in behavior exists between the 20th and 80th percentiles. This can be conveyed to readers through a short note. Instead of displaying all 100 percentiles, the line chart selectively includes only the 99th , 95th, 90th, 80th and 20th percentiles. This is a design choice that adds by subtraction.

Along the time axis, the line chart provides more granularity than either the map or the dot plot. The exit occurred roughly over the last two weeks of March and the first week of April. The start coincided with New York's stay-at-home advisory.

This third chart is a statistical graphic. It does not bring out the raw data but features aggregated and smoothed data designed to reveal a key message.

I encourage you to also study the annotated table later in the article. It shows the power of a well-designed table.

[P.S. 6/4/2020. On the book blog, I have just published a post about the underlying surveillance data for this type of analysis.]

 

 

Graph literacy, in a sense

Ben Jones tweeted out this chart, which has an unusual feature:

What's unusual is that time runs in both directions. Usually, the rule is that time runs left to right (except, of course, in right-to-left cultures). Here, the purple area chart follows that convention while the yellow area chart inverts it.

On the one hand, this is quite cute. Lines meeting in the middle. Converging. I get it.

On the other hand, every time a designer defies conventions, the reader has to recognize it, and to rationalize it.

In this particular graphic, I'm not convinced. There are four numbers only. The trend on either side looks linear so the story is simple. Why complicate it using unusual visual design?

Here is an entirely conventional bumps-like chart that tells the story:

I've done a couple of things here that might be considered controversial.

First, I completely straightened out the lines. I don't see what additional precision is bringing to the chart.

Second, despite having just four numbers, I added the year 1996 and vertical gridlines indicating decades. A Tufte purist will surely object.

***

Related blog post: "The Return on Effort in Data Graphics" (link)

Pulling the multi-national story out, step by step

Reader Aleksander B. found this Economist chart difficult to understand.

Given the chart title, the reader is looking for a story about multinationals producing lower return on equity than local firms. The first item displayed indicates that multinationals out-performed local firms in the technology sector.

The pie charts on the right column provide additional information about the share of each sector by the type of firms. Is there a correlation between the share of multinationals, and their performance differential relative to local firms?

***

We can clean up the presentation. The first changes include using dots in place of pipes, removing the vertical gridlines, and pushing the zero line to the background:

The horizontal gridlines attached to the zero line can also be removed:

Now, we re-order the rows. Start with the aggregate "All sectors". Then, order sectors from the largest under-performance by multinationals to the smallest.

The pie charts focus only on the share of multinationals. Taking away the remainders speeds up our perception:

Help the reader understand the data by dividing the sectors into groups, organized by the performance differential:

For what it's worth, re-sort the sectors from largest to smallest share of multinationals:

Having created groups of sectors by share of multinationals, I simplify further by showing the average pie chart within each group:

***

To recap all the edits, here is an animated gif: (if it doesn't play automatically, click on it)

***

Judging from the last graphic, I am not sure there is much correlation between share of multinationals and the performance differentials. It's interesting that in aggregate, local firms and multinationals performed the same. The average hides the variability by sector: in some sectors, local firms out-performed multinationals, as the original chart title asserted.

Clearing a forest of labels

This chart by the Financial Times has a strong message, and I like a lot about it:

The countries are by and large aligned along a diagonal, with the poorer countries growing strongly between 2007-2019 while the richer countries suffered negative growth.

A small issue with the chart is the thick forest of text - redundant text. The sub-title, the axis titles, the quadrant labels, and the left-right-half labels all repeat the same things. In the following chart, I simplify the text:

Typically, I don't put axis titles as a sub-header (or, header of the graphic) but as this may be part of the FT style, I respected it.