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| "Winners of Nobel prizes: top 5 nations", from The Guardian's 2016 article titled "Which Countries have had the most Nobel prize winners", additional annotations 'A', 'B', and 'C' added for reference. |
As a whole, this chart does a poor job of clearly explaining the data it references. This chart shows a rough proportion for each type of Nobel prize won by five countries, but beyond the already numbered areas, it is essentially impossible to interpolate the remaining numbers exactly.
These charts are capable of answering some questions about the data, one such example being: "In each listed country, which Nobel prize category has the highest number of winners?". In most cases however, this series of charts is not capable of providing concrete answers. For all five charts, asking a question like "Which was the 3rd most popular category for Nobel prize winners?" would not quickly or easily lead to a quantitative answer.
There are a few key areas which could be changed to improve the clarity of these charts:
- As seen in annotation 'A', each area should contain the numerical value being represented visually.
- In annotation 'B', the border extends outside the bounds of the area being represented, which has a side effect of making the areas of the surrounding boxes slightly unclear.
- Most importantly, in annotation 'C', these diagrams do not have a clear scale to reference. At a glance, these charts are highly based on visual proportion. If there is a difference between the green and pink boxes, it is unlikely a quantifiable number could be found.
- As a whole, the charts are highly inconsistent. Between each chart, individual boxes may scale horizontally or vertically, but for seemingly no reason as the shape of the charts can vary significantly like the 'France' chart. Improving consistency between charts would make it easier to compare the same categories across each of the five charts.
While these visualizations may look nice at a glance, for the purpose of actually visualizing data, a set of bar charts would be vastly superior. Each category would be easily compared to the others, and with a labelled axis, you would be able to quantify the exact number of prizes won in each category for each country.
This particular visualization was not interactive, but it would certainly have potential to be a useful interactive visualization. For example:
- Hovering over each box could show the category title, and number of winners.
- The categories could potentially be rearranged to sort themselves numerically (by area) rather than randomly.
- Depending on implementation, the different charts could be more easily compared to each other.
- Clicking each box could lead to a list of the winners for each category.
Overall, this visual is not very usefully representative of the data, and has great potential for improvement.
Hi Philip,
ReplyDeleteI like the point you make about the borders. I think you're right to say that the border somewhat skews the data. My one suggestion for future posts is to be careful of your grammar and punctuation. I noticed a few punctuation errors in your writing.
What the actual hell is this visualization!? I agree with your analysis wholeheartedly; I feel like this visualization is gorgeous to look at, but it doesn't really show us anything of value. I did notice a few punctuation errors that, while not detracting from the point of the analysis as a whole, may come across as something of an eye sore (especially to editors). Other than that, this was a good read!
ReplyDeleteWow Phillip, you found quite the interesting visualization. Your analysis is spot on, it could definitely use a makeover or two. Others have mentioned the punctuation, but I'll mention specifics so you know what the errors are. Specifically, you should look out for punctuation after quotations and also comma splices. Those are the two that stood out to me.
ReplyDeleteHi Philip,
ReplyDeleteI like how you used bullet points to clearly indicate your suggestions to improve the visualization. Furthermore, you also went through each labelled annotation in alphabetical order which gives the post a clear direction. One thing I think could be better is the grammar; there are some long run-on sentences that could be separated into shorter sentences and there are some instances of comma splices.
Hello Philip,
ReplyDeleteYou have a very good analysis. You easily answer the various questions required and the suggestions that you provided for an interactive visualization were interesting. I really like that you address each annotation individually, and that your solutions eliminate these issues that you have brought up.
Like the rest of the commenters, there are some punctuation errors. However, I do like that you bring up that viewers should be able to come to a quantitative answer when studying the visualization. All things considered, this is a really strong analysis.
Hello Philip,
ReplyDeleteI like how you answered multiple ways that you could improve the graph. They way that you used the bullet points really shows that you had multiple ideas of how to make this visual more strong I did notice a few grammar errors, but overall it was a good read
Hey Philip,
ReplyDeleteI like how you annotated and placarded the figure with text and a link, keeping those two parts together. Reading through, I agree with your conclusions on how the chart could be improved, and then highlighting in what way would be best. Only thing I would say could help the analysis be better, is maybe more images, but overall it is a very good analysis and I agree with your conclusions.
Hi Philip,
ReplyDeleteI liked your analysis and and agree with you that this visualization can be vastly improved with a set of bar graphs. Your suggestions for making this visualization an interactive one is also very good. One thing that I think can be improved on is the grammar and some punctuations.
This graphic has many flaws and your analysis did a good job of highlighting all of them. Other than a few minor grammatical issues, your analysis is solid and well-written.
ReplyDelete