Book Review: Visualizing with Text by Richard Brath

The creative process is sometimes described in terms of diverge-converge cycles. The diverge step involves experimentation and rewards suspending disbelief, while excesses are curbed and concepts refined during the converge step. Richard Brath's just-released book Visualizing with Text is an important resource that expands our appreciation for the place of text in visual displays.

Books on data visualization fall into recognizable types, of which two popular ones are the style guide, such as Edward Tufte, Dona Wong, and Alberto Cairo, and the coding manual, such as Ben Fry (processing) and Hadley Wickham (ggplot, Shiny). Brath's volume belongs to neither of those - it reads more like an encyclopedic catalog of how text can be incorporated into charts and graphs. He challenges us to blow up our imaginative space for characters, words, sentences, paragraphs and prose. It is a valuable aid for the diverge step of our creative process.

In modern data visualization, text is treated as an accessory, frequently found in titles, labels, legends, footnotes or surrounding text. Brath wants us to elevate text to the starring attraction. Starting with baby steps, such as direct labeling of lines and objects, and coordinating colors between chart elements and words, he experiments with inserting text into unlikely crannies, not shying away from ideas that even he admits may be somewhat of a dead-end.

One of the more immediately useful examples is the use of text labels that hug the lines on a line chart, similar to how roads and rivers are labeled on maps. I wish all software developers implement this function without delay.

A more esoteric example is to replace these lines with small-size text, as Brath makes an analogy between sentences and lines.

I am still deciding if this is a gold mine or a minefield. It is thought-provoking nonetheless.

Finally, the book includes some flights of fancy, like this one:

The red superscripts are numeric codes for French departments (provinces), arranged in ascending order of a given metric, and placed in proportional distance within the prose!

The converge step is left to the reader, as Brath refrains from bullhorning his opinions about chart types, which is why readers should not expect a style guide. He includes many experimental graphics, and may provide the pros and cons of a form without registering a judgement.

Because many of these ideas have yet to enter the mainstream, we'd need to implement these ideas on our own, which is why readers will not find a coding manual. As mentioned above, even the simplest and least controversial tactic of directly labeling lines is not available in Excel, let alone text that hugs or replaces lines. (This proves Brath's point that our community has done text a disservice.) Other ideas explored in later chapters require such features as italicizing numeric proportions of a word, rather than the entire word.

Recently, text has become a mainstay of Big Data. Visualizing with Text is timely, relevant and provocative. It is also clearly written, and tightly organized. Chapter 13 neatly summarizes the key concepts that have appeared along the way. There are plenty of use cases, primarily derived from research or business. After reading this book, you'll revel in the new sandbox of text, and long to free yourself from the constraints of your tool.

***

I recommend that you get the paper copy of the book. I reviewed the electronic version, and what irony! As you may have guessed, the electronic version ruins the typesetting. On every page, certain paragraphs show up in tiny font that resist all attempts to magnify, making Brath's case that legibility is an important metric for text visualization. Some of the more unusual fonts are dropped. The images are too small, even when popped up.

[P.S. Richard has a webpage where he included larger images and some code.]

Making better pie charts if you must

I saw this chart on an NYU marketing twitter account:

The graphical design is not easy on our eyes. It's just hard to read for various reasons.

The headline sounds like a subject line from an email.

The subheaders are long, and differ only by a single word.

Even if one prefers pie charts, they can be improved by following a few guidelines.

First, start the first sector at the 12-oclock direction. Like this:

The survey uses a 5-point scale from "Very Good" to "Very Bad". Instead of using five different colors, it's better to use two extreme colors and shading. Like this:

I also try hard to keep all text horizontal.

For those who prefers not to use pie charts, a side-by-side bar chart works well.

In my article for DataJournalism.com, I outlined "unspoken rules" for making various charts, including pie charts.

 

 

 

Why you should expunge the defaults from Excel or (insert your favorite graphing program)

Yesterday, I posted the following chart in the post about Cornell's Covid-19 case rate after re-opening for in-person instruction.

This is an edited version of the chart used in Peter Frazier's presentation.

The original chart carries with it the burden of Excel defaults.

What did I change and why?

I switched away from the default color scheme, which ignores the relationships between the two lines. In particular, the key comparison on this chart should be the actual case rate versus the nominal case rate. In addition, the three lines at the top are related as they all come from the same underlying mathematical model. I used the same color but different shades.

Also, instead of placing the legend as far away from the data labels as possible, I moved the line labels next to the data labels.

Instead of daily date labels, I moved to weekly labels, and set the month names on a separate level than the day names.

The dots were removed from the top three lines but I'd have retained them, perhaps with some level of transparency, if I spent more time making the edits. I'd definitely keep the last dot to make it clear that the blue lines contain one extra dot.

***

Every graphing program has defaults, typically computed by some algorithm tuned to the average chart. Don't settle for the average chart. Get rid of any default setting that slows down understanding.

 

 

A testing mess: one chart, four numbers, four colors, three titles, wrong units, wrong lengths, wrong data

Twitterstan wanted to vote the following infographic off the island:

(The publisher's website is here but I can't find a direct link to this graphic.)

The mishap is particularly galling given the controversy swirling around this year's A-Level results in the U.K. For U.S. readers, you can think of A-Levels as SAT Subject Tests, which in the U.K. are required of all university applicants, and represent the most important, if not the sole, determinant of admissions decisions. Please see the upcoming post on my book blog for coverage of the brouhaha surrounding the statistical adjustments (to be posted sometime this week, it's here.).

The first issue you may notice about the chart is that the bar lengths have no relationship with the numbers printed on them. Here is a scatter plot correlating the bar lengths and the data.

As you can see, nothing.

Then, you may wonder what the numbers mean. The annotation at the bottom right says "Average number of A level qualifications per student". Wow, the British (in this case, English) education system is a genius factory - with the average student mastering close to three thousand subjects in secondary (high) school!

TES is the cool name for what used to be the Times Educational Supplement. I traced the data back to Ofqual, which is the British regulator for these examinations. This is the Ofqual version of the above chart:

The data match. You may see that the header of the data table reads "Number of students in England getting 3 x A*". This is a completely different metric than number of qualifications - in fact, this metric measures geniuses. "A*" is the U.K. equivalent of "A+". When I studied under the British system, there was no such grade. I guess grade inflation is happening all over the world. What used to be A is now A+, and what used to be B is now A. Scoring three A*s is tops - I wonder if this should say 3 or more because I recall that you can take as many subjects as you desire but most students max out at three (may have been four).

The number of students attaining the highest achievement has increased in the last two years compared to the two years before. We can't interpret these data unless we know if the number of students also grew at similar rates.

The units are students while the units we expect from the TES graphic should be subjects. The cutoff for the data defines top students while the TES graphic should connote minimum qualification, i.e. a passing grade.

***
Now, the next section of the Ofqual infographic resolves the mystery. Here is the chart:

This dataset has the right units and measurement. There is almost no meaningful shift in the last four years. The average number of qualifications per student is only different at the second decimal place. Replacing the original data with this set removes the confusion.

While I was re-making this chart, I also cleaned out the headers and sub-headers. This is an example of software hegemony: the designer wouldn't have repeated the same information three times on a chart with four numbers if s/he wasn't prompted by software defaults.

***

The corrected chart violates one of the conventions I described in my tutorial for DataJournalism.com: color difference should reflect data difference.

In the following side-by-side comparison, you see that the use of multiple colors on the left chart signals different data - note especially the top and bottom bars which carry the same number, but our expectation is frustrated.

***

[P.S. 8/25/2020. Dan V. pointed out another problem with these bar charts: the bars were truncated so that the bar lengths are not proportional to the data. The corrected chart is shown on the right below:

8/26/2020: added link to the related post on my book blog.]

Everything in Texas is big, but not this BIG

Long-time reader John forwarded the following chart via Twitter.

The chart shows the recent explosive growth in deaths due to Covid-19 in Texas. John flagged this graphic as yet another example in which the data are encoded to the lengths of the squares, not their areas.

Fixing this chart just requires fixing the length of one side of the square. I also flipped it to make a conventional column chart.

The final product:

An important qualification lurks in the footnote; it is directly applied to the label of July.

How much visual distortion is created when data are encoded to the lengths and not the areas? The following chart shows what readers see, assuming they correctly perceive the areas of those squares. The value for March is held the same as above while the other months show the death counts implied by the relative areas of the squares.

Owing to squaring, the smaller counts are artificially compressed while the big numbers are massively exaggerated.

What is the price for objectivity

I knew I had to remake this chart.

The simple message of this chart is hidden behind layers of visual complexity. What the analyst wants readers to focus on (as discerned from the text on the right) is the red line, the seven-day moving average of new hospital admissions due to Covid-19 in Texas.

My eyes kept wandering away from the line. It's the sideway data labels on the columns. It's the columns that take up vastly more space than the red line. It's the sideway date labels on the horizontal axis. It's the redundant axis labels for hospitalizations when the entire data set has already been printed. It's the two hanging diamonds, for which the clues are filed away in the legend above.

Here's a version that brings out the message: after Phase 2 re-opening, the number of hospital admissions has been rising steadily.

Dots are used in place of columns, which push these details to the background. The line as well as periods of re-opening are directly labeled, removing the need for a legend.

Here's another visualization:

This chart plots the weekly average new hospital admissions, instead of the seven-day moving average. In the previous chart, the raggedness of moving average isn't transmitting any useful information to the average reader. I believe this weekly average metric is easier to grasp for many readers while retaining the general story.

***

On the original chart by TMC, the author said "the daily hospitalization trend shows an objective view of how COVID-19 impacts hospital systems." Objectivity is an impossible standard for any kind of data analysis or visualization. As seen above, the two metrics for measuring the trend in hospitalizations have pros and cons. Even if one insists on using a moving average, there are choices of averaging methods and window sizes.

Scientists are trained to believe in objectivity. It frequently disappoints when we discover that the rest of the world harbors no such notion. If you observe debates between politicians or businesspeople or social scientists, you rarely hear anyone claim one analysis is more objective - or less subjective - than another. The economist who predicts Dow to reach a new record, the business manager who argues for placing discounted products in the front not the back of the store, the sportscaster who maintains Messi is a better player than Ronaldo: do you ever hear these people describe their methods as objective?

Pursuing objectivity leads to the glorification of data dumps. The scientist proclaims disinterest in holding an opinion about the data. This is self-deception though. We clearly have opinions because when someone else  "misinterprets" the data, we express dismay. What is the point of pretending to hold no opinions when most of the world trades in opinions? By being "objective," we never shape the conversation, and forever play defense.

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.]

 

 

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.

***

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.

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.

How to read this chart about coronavirus risk

In my just-published Long Read article at DataJournalism.com, I touched upon the subject of "How to Read this Chart".

Most data graphics do not come with directions of use because dataviz designers follow certain conventions. We do not need to tell you, for example, that time runs left to right on the horizontal axis (substitute right to left for those living in right-to-left countries). It's when we deviate from the norms that calls for a "How to Read this Chart" box.

***
A discussion over Twitter during the weekend on the following New York Times chart perfectly illustrates this issue. (The article is well worth reading to educate oneself on this red-hot public-health issue. I made some comments on the sister blog about the data a few days ago.)

Reading this chart, I quickly grasp that the horizontal axis is the speed of infection and the vertical axis represents the deadliness. Without being told, I used the axis labels (and some of you might notice the annotations with the arrows on the top right.) But most people will likely miss - at a glance - that the vertical axis utilizes a log scale while the horizontal axis is linear (regular).

The effect of a log scale is to pull the large numbers toward the average while spreading the smaller numbers apart - when compared to a linear scale. So when we look at the top of the coronavirus box, it appears that this virus could be as deadly as SARS.

The height of the pink box is 3.9, while the gap between the top edge of the box and the SARS dot is 6. Yet our eyes tell us the top edge is closer to the SARS dot than it is to the bottom edge!

There is nothing inaccurate about this chart - the log scale introduces such distortion. The designer has to make a choice.

Indeed, there were two camps on Twitter, arguing for and against the log scale.

***

I use log scales a lot in analyzing data, but tend not to use log scales in a graph. It's almost a given that using the log scale requires a "How to Read this Chart" message. And the NY Times crew delivers!

Right below the chart is a paragraph:

To make this even more interesting, the horizontal axis is a hidden "log" scale. That's because infections spread exponentially. Even though the scale is not labeled "log", think as if the large values have been pulled toward the middle.

Here is an over-simplified way to see this. A disease that spreads at a rate of fifteen people at a time is not 3 times worse than one that spreads five at a time. In the former case, the first sick person transmits it to 15, and then each of the 15 transmits the flu to 15 others, thus after two steps, 241 people have been infected (225 + 15 + 1). In latter case, it's 5x5 + 5 + 1 = 31 infections after two steps. So at this point, the number of infected is already 8 times worse, not 3 times. And the gap keeps widening with each step.

P.S. See also my post on the sister blog that digs deeper into the metrics.