Junk Charts

Putting the house in order, two Brexit polls

Reader Steve M. noticed an oversight in the Guardian in the following bar chart (link):

The reporter was discussing an important story that speaks to the need for careful polling design. He was comparing two polls, one by Ipsos Mori, and one by YouGov, that estimates the vote support for each party in the future U.K. general election. The bottom line is that the YouGov poll predicts about double the support for the Brexit Party than the Ipsos-Mori poll.

The stacked bar chart should only be used for data that can be added up. Here, we should be comparing the numbers side by side:

I've always found this standard display inadequate. The story here is the gap in the two bar lengths for the Brexit Party. A secondary story is that the support for the Brexit Party might come from voters breaking from Labour. In other words, we really want the reader to see:

Switching to a dot plot helps bring attention to the gaps:

Now, putting the house in order:

Why do these two polls show such different results? As the reporter explained, the answer is in how the question was asked. The Ipsos-Mori is unprompted, meaning the Brexit Party was not announced to the respondent as one of the choices while the YouGov is prompted.

This last version imposes a direction on the gaps to bring out the secondary message - that the support for Brexit might be coming from voters breaking from Labour.

 

 

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).

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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.

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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.

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I found the following articles useful when researching this post:

The Conversation

Royal Chemistry Society

 

Pay levels in the U.S.

The Wall Street Journal published a graphic showing the median pay levels at "most" public companies in the U.S. here.

People who attended my dataviz seminar might recognize the similarity with the graphic showing internet download speeds by different broadband technologies. It's a clean, clear way of showing multiple comparisons on the same chart.

You can see the distribution of pay levels of companies within each industry grouping, and the vertical lines showing the sector medians allow comparison across sectors. The median pay levels are quite similar with the energy sector leaning higher, and consumer sector leaning lower.

The consumer sector is extremely heavy on the low side of the pay range. Companies like Universal, Abercrombie, Skechers, Mattel, Gap, etc. all pay at least half their employees less than $6,000. The data is sourced to MyLogIQ. I have no knowledge of how reliable or valid the data are. It's curious to me that Dunkin Brands showed a median of $110K while Starbucks showed $13K.

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I like the interactive features.

The window control lets the user zoom in to different parts of the pay range. This is necessary because of the extremely high salaries. The control doubles as a presentation of the overall distribution of median salaries.

The text box can be used to add data labels to specific companies.

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See previous discussion of WSJ Graphics.

 

Seeking simplicity in complex data: Bloomberg's dataviz on UK gender pay gap

Bloomberg featured a thought-provoking dataviz that illustrates the pay gap by gender in the U.K. The dataset underlying this effort is complex, and the designers did a good job simplifying the data for ease of comprehension.

U.K. companies are required to submit data on salaries and bonuses by gender, and by pay quartiles. The dataset is incomplete, since some companies are slow to report, and the analyst decided not to merge companies that changed names.

Companies are classified into industry groups. Readers who read Chapter 3 of Numbers Rule Your World (link) should ask whether these group differences are meaningful by themselves, without controlling for seniority, job titles, etc. The chapter features one method used by the educational testing industry to take a more nuanced analysis of group differences.

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The Bloomberg visualization has two sections. In the top section, each company is represented by the percent difference between average female pay and average male pay. Then the companies within a given industry is shown in a histogram. The histograms provide a view of the disparity between companies within a given industry. The black line represents the relative proportion of companies in a given industry that have no gender pay gap but it’s the weight of the histogram on either side of the black line that carries the graphic’s message.

This is the histogram for arts, entertainment and recreation.

The spread within this industry is very wide, especially on the left side of the black line. A large proportion of these companies pay women less on average than men, and how much less is highly variable. There is one extreme positive value: Chelsea FC Foundation that pays the average female about 40% more than the average male.

This is the histogram for the public sector.

It is a much tighter distribution, meaning that the pay gaps vary less from organization to organization (this statement ignores the possibility that there are outliers not visible on this graphic). Again, the vast majority of entities in this sector pay women less than men on average.

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The second part of the visualization look at the quartile data. The employees of each company are divided into four equal-sized groups, based on their wages. Think of these groups as the Top 25% Earners, the Second 25%, etc. Within each group, the analyst looks at the proportion of women. If gender is independent of pay, then we should expect the proportions of women to be about the same for all four quartiles. (This analysis considers gender to be the only explainer for pay gaps. This is a problem I've called xyopia, that frames a complex multivariate issue as a bivariate problem involving one outcome and one explanatory variable. Chapter 3 of Numbers Rule Your World (link) discusses how statisticians approach this issue.)

On the right is the chart for the public sector. This is a pie chart used as a container. Every pie has four equal-sized slices representing the four quartiles of pay.

The female proportion is encoded in both the size and color of the pie slices. The size encoding is more precise while the color encoding has only 4 levels so it provides a “binned” summary view of the same data.

For the public sector, the lighter-colored slice shows the top 25% earners, and its light color means the proportion of women in the top 25% earners group is between 30 and 50 percent. As we move clockwise around the pie, the slices represent the 2nd, 3rd and bottom 25% earners, and women form 50 to 70 percent of each of those three quartiles.

To read this chart properly, the reader must first do one calculation. Women represent about 60% of the top 25% earners in the public sector. Is that good or bad? This depends on the overall representation of women in the public sector. If the sector employs 75 percent women overall, then the 60 percent does not look good but if it employs 40 percent women, then the same value of 60% tells us that the female employees are disproportionately found in the top 25% earners.

That means the reader must compare each value in the pie chart against the overall proportion of women, which is learned from the average of the four quartiles.

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In the chart below, I make this relative comparison explicit. The overall proportion of women in each industry is shown using an open dot. Then the graphic displays two bars, one for the Top 25% earners, and one for the Bottom 25% earners. The bars show the gap between those quartiles and the overall female proportion. For the top earners, the size of the red bars shows the degree of under-representation of women while for the bottom earners, the size of the gray bars shows the degree of over-representation of women.

The net sum of the bar lengths is a plausible measure of gender inequality.

The industries are sorted from the ones employing fewer women (at the top) to the ones employing the most women (at the bottom). An alternative is to sort by total bar lengths. In the original Bloomberg chart - the small multiples of pie charts, the industries are sorted by the proportion of women in the bottom 25% pay quartile, from smallest to largest.

In making this dataviz, I elected to ignore the middle 50%. This is not a problem since any quartile above the average must be compensated by a different quartile below the average.

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The challenge of complex datasets is discovering simple ways to convey the underlying message. This usually requires quite a bit of upfront analytics, data transformation, and lots of sketching.

 

 

Watching a valiant effort to rescue the pie chart

Today we return to the basics. In a twitter exchange with Dean E., I found the following pie chart in an Atlantic article about who's buying San Francisco real estate:

The pie chart is great at one thing, showing how workers in the software industry accounted for half of the real estate purchases. (Dean and I both want to see more details of the analysis as we have many questions about the underlying data. In this post, I ignore these questions.)

After that, if we want to learn anything else from the pie chart, we have to read the data labels. This calls for one of my key recommendations: make your charts sufficient. The principle of self-sufficiency is that the visual elements of the data graphic should by themselves say something about the data. The test of self-sufficiency is executed by removing the data printed on the chart so that one can assess how much work the visual elements are performing. If the visual elements require data labels to work, then the data graphic is effectively a lookup table.

This is the same pie chart, minus the data:

Almost all pie charts with a large number of slices are packed with data labels. Think of the labeling as a corrective action to fix the shortcoming of the form.

Here is a bar chart showing the same data:

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Let's look at all the efforts made to overcome the lack of self-sufficiency.

Here is a zoom-in on the left side of the chart:

Data labels are necessary to help readers perceive the sizes of the slices. But as the slices are getting smaller, the labels are getting too dense, so the guiding lines are being stretched.

Eventually, the designer gave up on labeling every slice. You can see that some slices are missing labels:

The designer also had to give up on sequencing the slices by the data. For example, hardware with a value of 2.4% should be placed between Education and Law. It is shifted to the top left side to make the labeling easier.

Fitting all the data labels to the slices becomes the singular task at hand.

 

Not following direction or order, the dieticians complain

At first glance, this graphic's message seems clear: what proportion of Americans are exceeding or lagging guidelines for consumption of different food groups. Blue for exceeding; orange for lagging. The stacked bars are lined up at the central divider - the point of meeting recommended volumes - to make it easy to compare relative proportions.

The original chart is here, on the Health.gov website.

The little icons illustrating the food groups are cute and unintrusive.

It's when you read further that things start to get complicated. The last three rows display a flipping of the color scheme, with orange on the right, blue on the left. Up to this point, you may understand blue to mean over the recommended value, and orange is under. Suddenly, the orange is shown on the right side.

The designer was wrestling with a structural issue in the data. The last three food groups - sugars, fats and sodium - are things to eat less. So, having long bars on the right side is not good. The orange/blue colors should be interpreted as bad/good and not as under/over.

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The problem with this design is that it draws attention to this color flip - that is to say, it draws attention to which food groups are favored and which ones are to be avoided. This insight is actually in the metadata, not what this dataset is about.

In the following chart, I enforce the bad/good color scheme while ignoring the direction of good. The text is adjusted to use words that do not suggest direction.

Dieticians are probably distressed by this chart, given that most Americans are lagging on almost all of the recommendations.

In a final edit, I re-ordered the categories.

 

Pretty circular things

National Geographic features this graphic illustrating migration into the U.S. from the 1850s to the present.

 

What to Like

It's definitely eye-catching, and some readers will be enticed to spend time figuring out how to read this chart.

The inset reveals that the chart is made up of little colored strips that mix together. This produces a pleasing effect of gradual color gradation.

The white rings that separate decades are crucial. Without those rings, the chart becomes one long run-on sentence.

Once the reader invests time in learning how to read the chart, the reader will grasp the big picture. One learns, for example, that migrants from the most recent decades have come primarily from Latin America (orange) or Asia (pink). Migrants from Europe (green) and Canada (blue) came in waves but have been muted in the last few decades.

 

What's baffling

Initially, the chart is disorienting. It's not obvious whether the compass directions mean anything. We can immediately understand that the further out we go, the larger numbers of migrants. But what about which direction?

The key appears in the legend - which should be moved from bottom right to top left as it's so important. Apparently, continent/country of origin is coded in the directions.

This region-to-color coding seems to be rough-edged by design. The color mixing discussed above provides a nice artistic effect. Here, the reader finds out that mixing is primarily between two neighboring colors, thus two regions placed side by side on the chart. Thus, because Europe (green) and Asia (pink) are on opposite sides of the rings, those two colors do not mix.

Another notable feature of the chart is the lack of any data other than the decade labels. We won't learn how many migrants arrived in any decade, or the extent of migration as it impacts population size.

A couple of other comments on the circular design.

The circles expand in size for sure as time moves from inside out. Thus, this design only works well for "monotonic" data, that is to say, migration always increases as time passes.

The appearance of the chart is only mildly affected by the underlying data. Swapping the regions of origin changes the appearance of this design drastically.

 

 

 

 

 

Trump resistance chart: cleaning up order, importance, weight, paneling

Vox featured the following chart when discussing the rise of resistance to President Trump within the GOP.

The chart is composed of mirrored bar charts. On the left side, with thicker pink bars that draw more attention, the design depicts the share of a particular GOP demographic segment that said they'd likely vote for a Trump challenger, according to a Morning Consult poll.

This is the primary metric of interest, and the entire chart is ordered by descending values from African Americans who are most likely (67%) to turn to a challenger to those who strongly support Trump and are the least likely (17%) to turn to someone else.

The right side shows the importance of each demographic, measured by the share of GOP. The relationship between importance and likelihood to defect from Trump is by and large negative but that fact takes a bit of effort to extract from this mirrored bar chart arrangement.

The subgroups are not complete. For example, the only ethnicity featured is African Americans. Age groups are somewhat more complete with under 18 being the only missing category.

The design makes it easy to pick off the most disaffected demographic segments (and the least, from the bottom) but these are disparate segments, possibly overlapping.

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One challenge of this data is differentiating the two series of proportions. In this design, they use visual cues, like the height and width of the bars, colors, stacked vs not, data labels. Visual variety comes to the rescue.

Also note that the designer compensated for the lack of stacking on the left chart by printing data labels.

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When reading this chart, I'm well aware that segments like urban residents, income more than $100K, at least college educated are overlapping, and it's hard to interpret the data the way it's been presented.

I wanted to place the different demographics into their natural groups, such as age, income, urbanicity, etc. Such a structure also surfaces demographic patterns, e.g. men are slightly more disaffected than women (not significant), people earning $100K+ are more unhappy than those earning $50K-.

Further, I'd like to make it easier to understand the importance factor - the share of GOP. Because the original form orders the demographics according to the left side, the proportions on the right side are jumbled.

Here is a draft of what I have in mind:

The widths of the line segments show the importance of each demographic segment. The longest line segments are toward the bottom of the chart (< 40% likely to vote for Trump challenger).

 

The ebb and flow of an effective dataviz showing the rise and fall of GE

A WSJ chart caught my eye the other day – I spotted someone looking at it in a coffee shop, and immediately got a hold of a copy. The chart plots the ebb and flow of GE’s revenues from the 1980s to the present.

What grabbed my attention? The less-used chart form, and the appealing but not too gaudy color scheme.

The chart presents a highly digestible view of the structure of GE’s revenues. We learn about GE’s major divisions, as well as how certain segments split from or merged with others over time. Major acquisitions and divestitures are also depicted; if these events are the main focus, the designer should find ways to make these moments stand out more.

An interesting design decision concerns the sequence of the divisions. One possible order is by increasing or decreasing importance, typically indicated by proportional revenues. This is complicated by the changing nature of the business over the decades. So financial services went from nothing to the largest division by far to almost disappearing.

The sequencing need not be data-driven; it can be design-constrained. The merging and splitting of business units are conveyed via linking arrows. Longer arrows are unsightly, and meshes of arrows are confusing.

On this chart, the long arrow pointing from the orange to the gray around 2004 feels out of place. What if the financial services block is moved to the right of the consumer block? That will significantly shorten the long arrow. It won’t create other entanglements as the media block is completely disjoint and there are no other arrows tying financial services to another division.

 

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To improve readability, the bars are spaced out horizontally. The addition of whitespace distorts the proportionality. So, in 2001, the annotation states that financial services (orange) accounted for “about half of the revenues,” which is directly contradicted by the visual perception – readers find the orange bar to be clearly shorter than the total length of the other bars. This is a serious deficiency of the chart form but this chart conveys the "ebb and flow" very well.

Another experiment with enhanced pictogram

In a previous post, I experimented with an idea around enhancing pictograms. These are extremely popular charts used to show countable objects. I found another example in Business Insider's analysis of the mid-term election results. Here is an excerpt of a pair of pictograms that show the relative performance of Republicans and Democrats in districts that are classified as "Pure Rural" or "Rural-Suburban":

(Note that there is an error in the bottom left chart. There should be 24 blue squares not 34! In the remainder of the post, I will retain this error so that the revisions are comparable to the original.)

There are quite a few dimensions going on in this deceptively simple chart. There is the red domination of these rural districts to the tune of 75 to 80% share. There is the further weakening of Democrats from 2010 to 2018.  There is a shift of seats out of pure rural areas (- 13) and into rural-suburban (+14) from 2010 to 2018.

Anyone who learn of the above trends probably did so by reading off the data tables on the sides. It's a given that those tables, or simple bar charts can be more effective with this dataset.

What I like to explore is the pictogram, assuming that we are required to use a pictogram. Can the pictogram be enhanced to overcome some of its weaknesses?

The defining characteristic of the pictogram is the presence of individual units, which means the reader can count the units. This feature is also its downfall. In most pictograms, it is a bear to count the units. Try counting out the blue and red squares in the above image - and don't cheat by staring at the data tables!

My goal is to enhance the pictogram by making it easier for readers to count the units. The strategy is to place cues so that the units can be counted in larger groups like 5 or 10. Also, when possible, exploit symmetry.

Here is an example:

The squares are arranged to facilitate comparing the 2010 and 2018 numbers. So for rural-suburban, there were 10 fewer blue squares and +10+3 = +13 red squares.

This post to be continued in the next post ....