Reading an infographic about our climate crisis

Let's explore an infographic by SCMP, which draws attention to the alarming temperature recorded at Verkhoyansk in Russia on June 20, 2020. The original work was on the back page of the printed newspaper, referred to in this tweet.

This view of the globe brings out the two key pieces of evidence presented in the infographic: the rise in temperature in unexpected places, and the shrinkage of the Arctic ice.

A notable design decision is to omit the color scale. On inspection, the scale is present - it was sewn into the graphic.

I applaud this decision as it does not take the reader's eyes away from the graphic. Some information is lost as the scale isn't presented in full details but I doubt many readers need those details.

A key takeaway is that the temperature in Verkhoyansk, which is on the edge of the Arctic Circle, was the same as in New Delhi in India on that day. We can see how the red was encroaching upon the Arctic Circle.

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Next, the rapid shrinkage of the Arctic ice is presented in two ways. First, a series of maps.

The annotations are pared to the minimum. The presentation is simple enough such that we can visually judge that the amount of ice cover has roughly halved from 1980 to 2009.

A numerical measure of the drop is provided on the side.

Then, a line chart reinforces this message.

The line chart emphasizes change over time while the series of maps reveals change over space.

This chart suggests that the year 2020 may break the record for the smallest ice cover since 1980. The maps of Australia and India provide context to interpret the size of the Arctic ice cover.

I'd suggest reversing the pink and black colors so as to refer back to the blue and pink lines in the globe above.

***

The final chart shows the average temperature worldwide and in the Arctic, relative to a reference period (1981-2000).

This one is tough. It looks like an area chart but it should be read as a line chart. The darker line is the anomaly of Arctic average temperature while the lighter line is the anomaly of the global average temperature. The two series are synced except for a brief period around 1940. Since 2000, the temperatures have been dramatically rising above that of the reference period.

If this is a stacked area chart, then we'd interpret the two data series as summable, with the sum of the data series signifying something interesting. For example, the market shares of different web browsers sum to the total size of the market.

But the chart above should not be read as a stacked area chart because the outside envelope isn't the sum of the two anomalies. The problem is revealed if we try to articulate what the color shades mean.

On the far right, it seems like the dark shade is paired with the lighter line and represents global positive anomalies while the lighter shade shows Arctic's anomalies in excess of global. This interpretation only works if the Arctic line always sits above the global line. This pattern is broken in the late 1990s.

Around 1999, the Arctic's anomaly is negative while the global anomaly is positive. Here, the global anomaly gets the lighter shade while the Arctic one is blue.

One possible fix is to encode the size of the anomaly into the color of the line. The further away from zero, the darker the red/blue color.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

Locating the political center

I mentioned the September special edition of Bloomberg Businessweek on the election in this prior post. Today, I'm featuring another data visualization from the magazine.

***

Here are the rightmost two charts.

Time runs from top to bottom, spanning four decades.

Each chart covers a political issue. These two charts concern abortion and marijuana.

The marijuana question (far right) has only two answers, legalize or don't legalize. The underlying data measure the proportions of people agreeing to each point of view. Roughly three-quarters of the population disagreed with legalization in 1980 while two-thirds agree with it in 2020.

Notice that there are no horizontal axis labels. This is a great editorial decision. Only coarse trends are of interest here. It's not hard to figure out the relative proportions. Adding labels would just clutter up the display.

By contrast, the abortion question has three answer choices. The middle option is "Sometimes," which is represented by a white color, with a dot pattern. This is an issue on which public opinion in aggregate has barely shifted over time.

The charts are organized in a small-multiples format. It's likely that readers are consuming each chart individually.

***

What about the dashed line that splits each chart in half? Why is it there?

The vertical line assists our perception of the proportions. Think of it as a single gridline.

In fact, this line is underplayed. The headline of the article is "tracking the political center." Where is the center?

Until now, we've paid attention to the boundaries between the differently colored areas. But those boundaries do not locate the political center!

The vertical dashed line is the political center; it represents the view of the median American. In 1980, the line sat inside the gray section, meaning the median American opposed legalizing marijuana. But the prevalent view was losing support over time and by 2010, there wer more Americans wanting to legalize marijuana than not. This is when the vertical line crossed into the green zone.

The following charts draw attention to the middle line, instead of the color boundaries:

On these charts, as you glance down the middle line, you can see that for abortion, the political center has never exited the middle category while for marijuana, the median American didn't want to legalize it until an inflection point was reached around 2010.

I highlight these inflection points with yellow dots.

***

The effect on readers is entirely changed. The original charts draw attention to the areas first while the new charts pull your eyes to the vertical line.

 

Election visual 3: a strange, mash-up visualization

Continuing our review of FiveThirtyEight's election forecasting model visualization (link), I now look at their headline data visualization. (The previous posts in this series are here, and here.)

It's a set of 22 maps, each showing one election scenario, with one candidate winning. What chart form is this?

Small multiples may come to mind. A small-multiples chart is a grid in which every component graphic has the same form - same chart type, same color scheme, same scale, etc. The only variation from graphic to graphic is the data. The data are typically varied along a dimension of interest, for example, age groups, geographic regions, years. The following small-multiples chart, which I praised in the past (link), shows liquor consumption across the world.

Each component graphic changes according to the data specific to a country. When we scan across the grid, we draw conclusions about country-to-country variations. As with convention, there are as many graphics as there are countries in the dataset. Sometimes, the designer includes only countries that are directly relevant to the chart's topic.

***

What is the variable FiveThirtyEight chose to vary from map to map? It's the scenario used in the election forecasting model.

This choice is unconventional. The 22 scenarios is a subset of the 40,000 scenarios from the simulation - we are left wondering how those 22 are chosen.

Returning to our question: what chart form is this?

Perhaps you're reminded of the dot plot from the previous post. On that dot plot, the designer summarized the results of 40,000 scenarios using 100 dots. Since Biden is the winner in 75 percent of all scenarios, the dot plot shows 75 blue dots (and 25 red).

The map is the new dot. The 75 blue dots become 16 blue maps (rounded down) while the 25 red dots become 6 red maps.

Is it a pictogram of maps? If we ignore the details on the maps, and focus on the counts of colors, then yes. It's just a bit challenging because of the hole in the middle, and the atypical number of maps.

As with the dot plot, the map details are a nice touch. It connects readers with the simulation model which can feel very abstract.

Oddly, if you're someone familiar with probabilities, this presentation is quite confusing.

With 40,000 scenarios reduced to 22 maps, each map should represent 1818 scenarios. On the dot plot, each dot should represent 400 scenarios. This follows the rule for creating pictograms. Each object in a pictogram - dot, map, figurine, etc. - should encode an equal amount of the data. For the 538 visualization, is it true that each of the six red maps represents 1818 scenarios? This may be the case but not likely.

Recall the dot plot where the most extreme red dot shows a scenario in which Trump wins 376 out of 538 electoral votes (margin = 214). Each dot should represent 400 scenarios. The visualization implies that there are 400 scenarios similar to the one on display. For the grid of maps, the following red map from the top left corner should, in theory, represent 1,818 similar scenarios. Could be, but I'm not sure.

Mathematically, each of the depicted scenario, including the blowout win above, occurs with 1/40,000 chance in the simulation. However, one expects few scenarios that look like the extreme scenario, and ample scenarios that look like the median scenario.  

So, the right way to read the 538 chart is to ignore the map details when reading the embedded pictogram, and then look at the small multiples of detailed maps bearing in mind that extreme scenarios are unique while median scenarios have many lookalikes.

(Come to think about it, the analogous situation in the liquor consumption chart is the relative population size of different countries. When comparing country to country, we tend to forget that the data apply to large numbers of people in populous countries, and small numbers in tiny countries.)

***

There's a small improvement that can be made to the detailed maps. As I compare one map to the next, I'm trying to pick out which states that have changed to change the vote margin. Conceptually, the number of states painted red should decrease as the winning margin decreases, and the states that shift colors should be the toss-up states.

So I'd draw the solid Republican (Democratic) states with a lighter shade, forming an easily identifiable bloc on all maps, while the toss-up states are shown with a heavier shade.

Here, I just added a darker shade to the states that disappear from the first red map to the second.

Deaths as percent neither of cases nor of population. Deaths as percent of normal.

Yesterday, I posted a note about excess deaths on the book blog (link). The post was inspired by a nice data visualization by the New York Times (link). This is a great example of data journalism.

Excess deaths is a superior metric for measuring the effect of Covid-19 on public health. It's better than deaths as percent of cases. Also better than percent of the population.What excess deaths measure is deaths as a percent of normal. Normal is usually defined as the average deaths in the respective week in years past.

The red areas indicate how far the deaths in the Southern states are above normal. The highest peak, registered in Texas in late July, is 60 percent above the normal level.

***

The best way to appreciate the effort that went into this graphic is to imagine receiving the outputs from the model that computes excess deaths. A three-column spreadsheet with columns "state", "week number" and "estimated excess deaths".

The first issue is unequal population sizes. More populous states of course have higher death tolls. Transforming death tolls to an index pegged to the normal level solves this problem. To produce this index, we divide actual deaths by the normal level of deaths. So the spreadsheet must be augmented by two additional columns, showing the historical average deaths and actual deaths for each state for each week. Then, the excess death index can be computed.

The journalist builds a story around the migration of the coronavirus between different regions as it rages across different states  during different weeks. To this end, the designer first divides the dataset into four regions (South, West, Midwest and Northeast). Within each region, the states must be ordered. For each state, the week of peak excess deaths is identified, and the peak index is used to sort the states.

The graphic utilizes a small-multiples framework. Time occupies the horizontal axis, by convention. The vertical axis is compressed so that the states are not too distant. For the same reason, the component graphs are allowed to overlap vertically. The benefit of the tight arrangement is clearer for the Northeast as those peaks are particularly tall. The space-saving appearance reminds me of sparklines, championed by Ed Tufte.

There is one small tricky problem. In most of June, Texas suffered at least 50 percent more deaths than normal. The severity of this excess death toll is shortchanged by the low vertical height of each component graph. What forced such congestion is probably the data from the Northeast. For example, New York City:

 

New York City's death toll was almost 8 times the normal level at the start of the epidemic in the U.S. If the same vertical scale is maintained across the four regions, then the Northeastern states dwarf all else.

***

One key takeaway from the graphic for the Southern states is the persistence of the red areas. In each state, for almost every week of the entire pandemic period, actual deaths have exceeded the normal level. This is strong indication that the coronavirus is not under control.

In fact, I'd like to see a second set of plots showing the cumulative excess deaths since March. The weekly graphic is better for identifying the ebb and flow while the cumulative graphic takes measure of the total impact of Covid-19.

***

The above description leaves out a huge chunk of work related to computing excess deaths. I assumed the designer receives these estimates from a data scientist. See the related post in which I explain how excess deaths are estimated from statistical models.

 

This chart shows why the PR agency for the UK government deserves a Covid-19 bonus

The Economist illustrated some interesting consumer research with this chart (link):

The survey by Dalia Research asked people about the satisfaction with their country's response to the coronavirus crisis. The results are reduced to the "Top 2 Boxes", the proportion of people who rated their government response as "very well" or "somewhat well".

This dimension is laid out along the horizontal axis. The chart is a combo dot and bubble chart, arranged in rows by region of the world. Now what does the bubble size indicate?

It took me a while to find the legend as I was expecting it either in the header or the footer of the graphic. A larger bubble depicts a higher cumulative number of deaths up to June 15, 2020.

The key issue is the correlation between a country's death count and the people's evaluation of the government response.

Bivariate correlation is typically shown on a scatter plot. The following chart sets out the scatter plots in a small multiples format with each panel displaying a region of the world.

The death tolls in the Asian countries are low relative to the other regions, and yet the people's ratings vary widely. In particular, the Japanese people are pretty hard on their government.

In Europe, the people of Greece, Netherlands and Germany think highly of their government responses, which have suppressed deaths. The French, Spaniards and Italians are understandably unhappy. The British appears to be the most forgiving of their government, despite suffering a higher death toll than France, Spain or Italy. This speaks well of their PR operation.

Cumulative deaths should be adjusted by population size for a proper comparison across nations. When the same graphic is produced using deaths per million (shown on the right below), the general story is preserved while the pattern is clarified:

The right chart shows deaths per million while the left chart shows total deaths.

***

In the original Economist chart, what catches our attention first is the bubble size. Eventually, we notice the horizontal positioning of these bubbles. But the star of this chart ought to be the new survey data. I swapped those variables and obtained the following graphic:

Instead of using bubble size, I switched to using color to illustrate the deaths-per-million metric. If ratings of the pandemic response correlate tightly with deaths per million, then we expect the color of these dots to evolve from blue on the left side to red on the right side.

The peculiar loss of correlation in the U.K. stands out. Their PR firm deserves a bonus!

Working with multiple dimensions, an example from Germany

An anonymous reader submitted this mirrored bar chart about violent acts by extremists in the 16 German states.

At first glance, this looks like a standard design. On a second look, you might notice what the reader discovered- the chart used two different scales, one for each side. The left side (red) depicting left-wing extremism is artificially compressed relative to the right side (blue). Not sure if this reflects the political bias of the publication - but in any case, this distortion means the only way to consume this chart is to read the numbers.

Even after fixing the scales, this design is challenging for the reader. It's unnatural to compare two years by looking first below then above. It's not simple to compare across states, and even harder to compare left- and right-wing extremism (due to mirroring).

The chart feels busy because the entire dataset is printed on it. I appreciate not including a redundant horizontal axis. (I wonder if the designer first removed the axis, then edited the scale on one side, not realizing the distortion.) Another nice touch, hidden in the legend, is the country totals.

I present two alternatives.

The first is a small-multiples "bumps chart".

Each plot presents the entire picture within a state. You can see the general level of violence, the level of left- and right-wing extremism, and their year-on-year change. States can be compared holistically.

Several German state names are rather long, so I explored a horizontal orientation. In this case, a connected dot plot may be more appropriate.

The sign of a good multi-dimensional visual display is whether readers can easily learn complex relationships. Depending on the question of interest, the reader can mentally elevate parts of this chart. One can compare the set of blue arrows to the set of red arrows, or focus on just blue arrows pointing right, or red arrows pointing left, or all arrows for Berlin, etc.

 

[P.S. Anonymous reader said the original chart came from the Augsburger newspaper. This link in German contains more information.]

Consumption patterns during the pandemic

The impact of Covid-19 on the economy is sharp and sudden, which makes for some dramatic data visualization. I enjoy reading the set of charts showing consumer spending in different categories in the U.S., courtesy of Visual Capitalist.

The designer did a nice job cleaning up the data and building a sequential story line. The spending are grouped by categories such as restaurants and travel, and then sub-categories such as fast food and fine dining.

Spending is presented as year-on-year change, smoothed.

Here is the chart for the General Commerce category:

The visual design is clean and efficient. Even too sparse because one has to keep returning to the top to decipher the key events labelled 1, 2, 3, 4. Also, to find out that the percentages express year-on-year change, the reader must scroll to the bottom, and locate a footnote.

As you move down the page, you will surely make a stop at the Food Delivery category, noting that the routine is broken.

I've featured this device - an element of surprise - before. Remember this Quartz chart that depicts drinking around the world (link).

The rule for small multiples is to keep the visual design identical but vary the data from chart to chart. Here, the exceptional data force the vertical axis to extend tremendously.

This chart contains a slight oversight - the red line should be labeled "Takeout" because food delivery is the label for the larger category.

Another surprise is in store for us in the Travel category.

I kept staring at the Cruise line, and how it kept dipping below -100 percent. That seems impossible mathematically - unless these cardholders are receiving more refunds than are making new bookings. Not only must the entire sum of 2019 bookings be wiped out, but the records must also show credits issued to these credit (or debit) cards. It's curious that the same situation did not befall the airlines. I think many readers would have liked to see some text discussing this pattern.

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Now, let me put on a data analyst's hat, and describe some thoughts that raced through my head as I read these charts.

Data analysis is hard, especially if you want to convey the meaning of the data.

The charts clearly illustrate the trends but what do the data reveal? The designer adds commentary on each chart. But most of these comments count as "story time." They contain speculation on what might be causing the trend but there isn't additional data or analyses to support the storyline. In the General Commerce category, the 50 to 100 percent jump in all subcategories around late March is attributed to people stockpiling "non-perishable food, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper". That might be true but this interpretation isn't supported by credit or debit card data because those companies do not have details about what consumers purchased, only the total amount charged to the cards. It's a lot more work to solidify these conclusions.

A lot of data do not mean complete or unbiased data.

The data platform provided data on 5 million consumers. We don't know if these 5 million consumers are representative of the 300+ million people in the U.S. Some basic demographic or geographic analysis can help establish the validity. Strictly speaking, I think they have data on 5 million card accounts, not unique individuals. Most Americans use more than one credit or debit cards. It's not likely the data vendor have a full picture of an individual's or a family's spending.

It's also unclear how much of consumer spending is captured in this dataset. Credit and debit cards are only one form of payment.

Data quality tends to get worse.

One thing that drives data analyst nuts. The spending categories are becoming blurrier. In the last decade or so, big business has come to dominate the American economy. Big business, with bipartisan support, has grown by (a) absorbing little guys, and (b) eliminating boundaries between industry sectors. Around me, there is a Walgreens, several Duane Reades, and a RiteAid. They currently have the same owner, and increasingly offer the same selection. In the meantime, Walmart (big box), CVS (pharmacy), Costco (wholesale), etc. all won regulatory relief to carry groceries, fresh foods, toiletries, etc. So, while CVS or Walgreens is classified as a pharmacy, it's not clear that what proportion of the spending there is for medicines. As big business grows, these categories become less and less meaningful.

More visuals of the economic crisis

As we move into the next phase of the dataviz bonanza arising from the coronavirus pandemic, we will see a shift from simple descriptive graphics of infections and deaths to bivariate explanatory graphics claiming (usually spurious) correlations.

The FT is leading the way with this effort, and I hope all those who follow will make a note of several wise decisions they made.

• They source their data. Most of the data about business activities come from private entities, many of which are data vendors who make money selling the data. In this article, FT got restaurant data from OpenTable, retail foot traffic data from Springboard, box office data from Box Office Mojo, flight data from Flightradar24, road traffic data from TomTom, and energy use data from European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity.
• They generally let the data and charts speak without "story time". The text primarily describes the trends of the various data series.
• They selected sectors that are obviously impacted by the shutdowns so any link between the observed trends and the crisis is plausible.

The FT charts are examples of clarity. Here is the one about road traffic patterns in major cities:

The cities are organized into regions: Europe, US, China, other Asia.

The key comparison is the last seven days versus the historical averages. The stories practically jump out of the page. Traffic in Paris collapsed on Tuesday. Wuhan is still locked down despite the falloff in infections. Drivers of Tokyo are probably wondering why teams are not going to the Olympics this year. Londoners? My guess is they're determined to not let another Brexit deadline slip.

***

I'd hope we go even further than FT when publishing this type of visual analytics involving "Big Data." These business data obtained from private sources typically have OCCAM properties: they are observational, seemingly complete, uncontrolled, adapted and merged. All these properties make the data very challenging to interpret.

The coronavirus case and death counts are simple by comparison. People are now aware of all the problems from differential rates of testing to which groups are selectively tested (i.e. triage) to how an infection or death is defined. The problems involving Big Data are much more complex.

I have three additional proposals:

Disclosure of Biases and Limitations

The private data have many more potential pitfalls. Take OpenTable data for example. The data measure restaurant bookings, not revenues. It measures gross bookings, not net bookings (i.e. removing no-shows). Only a proportion of restaurants use OpenTable (which cost owners money). OpenTable does not strike me as a quasi-monopoly so there are competitors with significant market share. The restaurants that use OpenTable do not form a random subsample of all restaurants. One of the most popular restaurants in the U.S. are pizza joints, with little of no seating, which do not feature in the bookings data. OpenTable also has differential popularity by country, region, or probably cuisine. 

I believe data journalists ought to provide such context in a footnote. Readers should have the information to judge whether they believe the data are sufficiently representative. Private data vendors who want data journalists to feature their datasets should be required to supply a footnote that describes the biases and limitations of their data.

Data journalists should think seriously about how they headline this type of chart. The standard practice is what FT adopted. The headline said "Restaurant bookings have collapsed" with a small footnote saying "Source: OpenTable". Should the headline have said "OpenTable bookings have collapsed" instead?

Disclosure of Definitions and Proxies

In the road traffic chart shown above, the metric is called "TomTom traffic congestion index". In order to earn this free advertising (euphemistically called "earned media" by industry), TomTom should be obliged to explain how this index is constructed. What does index = 100 mean?

[For example, it is curious that the Madrid index values are much lower across the board than those in Paris and Roma.]

For the electric usage chart, FT discloses the name of the data provider as a group of "43 electricity transmission system operators in 36 countries across Europe." Now, that is important context but can be better. The group may consist of 43 operators but how many of them are in the dataset? What proportion of the total electric usage do they account for in each country? If they have low penetration in a particular country, do they just report the low statistics or adjust the numbres?

If the journalist decides to use a proxy, for example, OpenTable restaurant bookings to reflect restaurant revenues, that should be explained, perhaps even justified.

Data as a Public Good

If private businesses choose to supply data to media outlets as a public service, they should allow the underlying data to be published.

Speaking from experience, I've seen a lot of bad data. It's one thing to hold your nose when the data are analyzed to make online advertising more profitable, or to find signals to profit from the stock market. It's another thing for the data analysis to drive public policy, in this case, policies that will have life-or-death implications.

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.