 |
| "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.
