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Chaotic, Neutral and Lawful

chart planet Posted on 2022-11-22 by Chart Planet2022-11-22

Lawful – following the best data visualization rules.

Neutral – basically following the defaults.

Chaotic – doing some “design”.

How is the pie chart among “good” ones?

Posted in dataviz ideas | Tagged Excel, Meme

What are the differences between men and women according to MBTI?

chart planet Posted on 2022-07-27 by Chart Planet2022-07-27

What: Type distributions among men and among women.
When: Data was gathered in 2018.
Where: A selection of mostly western countries with representative samples.
Source: MBTI Manual Global Supplements Series | The Myers-Briggs Company (themyersbriggs.com)

Posted in charts | Tagged Dumbbell chart, Interactive, MBTI, Tableau

Where each MBTI type is the most common?

chart planet Posted on 2022-07-13 by Chart Planet2022-07-13

What: % of all respondents in a country which represent this type. Country = 100% , but wider bars indicate, that this % of this type is among the top 3 highest in all listed countries. If you’re looking for this type – it is best to look in this country.
When: Data was gathered in 2018.
Where: Only the countries with representative samples are portrayed in the chart.
Source: MBTI Manual Global Supplements Series | The Myers-Briggs Company (themyersbriggs.com)

Posted in charts | Tagged Interactive, MBTI, Stacked bar chart, Tableau

Is energy the main driver of inflation?

chart planet Posted on 2022-06-28 by Chart Planet2022-06-28

What: Annual inflation of different items. “Energy” is an aggregate compiled from “Transport” and “Housing” items, so it does overlap with them.
When: 1997-2021
Where: European Union – from 15 countries in 1996, to 27 countries in 2021.
Source: Eurostat database

Posted in charts | Tagged Bump chart, Inflation, Interactive, Scatterplot, Tableau

Inflation and interest rates were going down … until NOW

chart planet Posted on 2022-04-20 by Chart Planet2022-04-20

What: Annual inflation rate and 3-month interbank rate.
When: Every month from January 1990 till January or February 2022 (latest data available).
Where: All countries available in the OECD database (OECD countries + some other countries) which have data for 2022 (that’s why no China here) except Luxembourg.
Source: OECD

Posted in charts | Tagged Connected scatterplot, Interest, Prices, R, SVG editing

You can still cheat in Tableau! Examples of dark practices

chart planet Posted on 2022-01-01 by Chart Planet2022-01-01

Tableau is famous for following the best of the best practices in the DataViz world – it has no 3D effect, the pie chart is marginalized, there are no curved lines, no dashed lines, and the colour palettes are near perfect. One will question whether dashed lines are really a bad practice, another one will easily recreate curved lines with the “data-densification” technique, and here I will argue that there are still plenty of ways to make misleading charts in Tableau.

May this article draw your attention to what the dark practices might be, and whether to use them or to recognize and fight them is the decision to make for each reader.

Dramatic growth

This is the simplest and probably most used dark practice in real life – simply cutting the axis above zero. Whether it is a good or dark practice depends a lot on the context. Line chart allows to do this “legally”, but here I’m adding some more distortion by changing colours to a more dramatic hue and additionally encoding the size of a bubble to a variable.

Not so easy comparison

Tableau allows for bubble charts that look cool, but are rarely useful to communicate changes in values until your aim is to hide that subtle change. If there is a KPI on your dashboard you don’t really want anyone to see changing – use bubbles. Leaving out the printed numbers would render this visualization practically useless.

However, the same bubbles could actually emphasize the difference if placed one above the other – this would be more like an unnecessary overdesigning rather than dark practice.

Not so easy comparison again

Bubbles are very effective to obscure comparisons between categories. The same could be achieved also with colour, and Tableau allows it to happen so easily! Of course, the top and bottom values are easily seen, but the middle is quite muddy, it would be very difficult to sort them without printed numbers.

Both dark practices shown here would be difficult to reproduce on Excel.

Not so easy comparison by stacking

I’ve seen such stacking more as a result of trying to make a cooler chart rather than a dark practice (it was a donut chart by the way). But it could be used to conceal the true difference in numbers. Additionally – make the part you want to look bigger much more saturated, and put the border of the same colour around both bars. No smart reader would be fooled by such arrangements, but if there are more charts to digest on the page, the message might slip unnoticed.

Hiding a relation

Scatterplots are not that easy to read and get for the untrained audience and that is why they are not used often, however they are perfect to show a relation between two variables. Line charts might be used to show the relation, but they could be used to hide that relation – removing lines and making markers a bit oversized effectively obscures the actual direction of data.

Disguised negative number

This was the actual problem I faced in my job – how to explicitly show profit numbers and somehow make the loss at one period be not that very visible. First of all, we could make the profit and loss to be the same colour, then move the number of loss above – as those of profit, then remove the reference line and finally make the bars thinner. Again – acute reader would quickly recognize dark practices used against him, but only if he is not overwhelmed with charts.

3D still possible

And finally the trick as old as Excel – 3D pie charts are notorious for distorting reality and more often than not they distort it unintenionally, however clever masters of dark practices utilize this feature to their benefit.

With smart preparation of data, dynamic 3D charts are still possible in Tableau. The one seen here is drawn “by hand”, feeding Tableau exact coordinate of each point. A more saturated colour and annotation further serve exaggeration of our company’s market share.

Click the tabs in the visualization above to see all the interactive versions of charts in this article.

Dark practices

Dark practice is not making bad decisions about data vizualizations. It’s making smart intentional decisions to distort viewers’ perception of the data.

Dark practice is not faking the data, it is making the data to appear showing what it might not be showing.

Dark practice is not lying, it is not telling the truth.

Posted in dataviz ideas | Tagged Dark practice, Tableau

Lietuvos ekonomikos švieslentė (2021 K3)

chart planet Posted on 2021-06-27 by Chart Planet2022-01-01

Skirta ketvirtinei apžvalgai, tačiau nepametant istorinės perspektyvos.

CONTINUE READING >>>
Posted in LT grafikai | Tagged Dashboard, GDP, Interactive, Tableau

What are the long term gains on cryptocurrencies?

chart planet Posted on 2021-06-16 by Chart Planet2021-11-20

What: The chart shows average daily gain in $ if $1000 were invested at a date on x-axis. Total gain was divided by the number of days between the day of investing and June 13, 2021. Gains were calculated on average 30-day prices.
When: from March 28, 2013, till June 13, 2021
Source: investing.com and coingecko.com

Posted in charts | Tagged Area chart, Cryptocurrency, R, SVG editing

Is the economic gap between new and old EU members closing?

chart planet Posted on 2021-06-02 by Chart Planet2021-06-13

What: GDP per capita, chain linked volumes (2010) in euro
When: 2004-2020
Where: Current EU members (as of 2021)

Posted in charts | Tagged Dot chart, EU, GDP, Histogram, Interactive, Tableau

Is it easy to replicate the default settings of one charting software in another charting software?

chart planet Posted on 2021-06-02 by Chart Planet2021-11-21

The question is it easy to replicate the default settings of one charting software in another charting software bothered me for some time. Are the default settings more universal or less universal? Do different vendors have different attitudes towards what should be the default setting?

I chose to work with a line chart because different software interprets differently how to arrange multiple series in a bar chart – some tools stack them, some not. By adjusting this arrangement I would lose the defaultness, while without any corrections the charts would be less comparable. I made all charts squared, so they fit better in the grid.

This comparison does not include online tools like Datawrapper because a significant part of their settings are the interactions – tooltips, highlights, etc and here only static images are compared. I would like to include JMP, but my trial period has already expired. Python and Javascript libraries are not included, because I don’t know how to use them.

Insights about the defaults:

  • All have horizontal gridlines, ggplot2 and Tableau have even vertical ones.
  • Only Google Data Studio and Tableau have highlighted the zero line, although Tableau highlight is barely noticeable.
  • Blue and red or orange are within the first three choices in every palette.
  • ggplot2 looks exceptional with its grey panel.
  • The default settings of Tableau make the least sense because they are configured for more charts with more legends. One chart with one legend looks a bit weird.
  • Grey squares at the top right of Google Data Studio charts are how the control buttons are rendered as an image.

Insights about the comparisons:

  • Of course, ggplot2 manages to replicate even the most complex cases. The biggest challenge was using Google font from Google Data Studio because the library”showtext” which seemingly allows achieving this does not work well with ggplot2.
  • Settings of ggplot2 itself were the most difficult to replicate.
  • Tableau was the only software that could not replicate the exact colours of lines, because a colour must be chosen from a predefined palette there.
  • It was quite annoying that Power BI and Google Data Studio could only export to PDF, however they are not meant to make pretty pictures after all.
  • Somehow square charts from Excel lost the squareness after saved as images.
  • Google Data Studio insisted on a black line indicating zero and refused to show vertical gridlines. Maybe I just don’t know this tool well enough or maybe these are the limits.
  • Adjusting the limits of the x-axis was always a challenge, the y-axis is often allowed for way more freedom.
  • Adjusting legends was always the most difficult part. Legend is what distinguishes one tool from another.

I believe this exercise is of little use, but it was fun to do it!

Posted in dataviz ideas | Tagged Excel, Google Data Studio, Power BI, R, Same chart many tools, Tableau

Ar sveikstame nuo koronaviruso? (2021-12-27)

chart planet Posted on 2021-05-27 by Chart Planet2021-12-30

Turime ir vakcinas ir griežtas priemones valstybės mastu suvaldyti ligos siautėjimą.

Su viltimi, kad viskas bus tik geriau stebiu Covid-19 ligos paplitimą Lietuvoje ir pasaulyje. Duomenys savaitiniai. Atnaujinama nereguliariai.

Ne visi sergantys šia liga yra testujami ir užfiksuojami, nes trūksta tiek pačių testų, tiek darbo jėgos medicinos sektoriuje, taigi gali būti, kad žmogus susirgo ir mirė nepastebėtas. Taip pat dėl sergančiųjų antplūdžio ligoninėse žmonės nesulaukę medicininės pagalbos gali mirti ir nuo kitų ligų, nuo kurių galėtų būti išgelbėti. Dėl to svarbu stebėti ne Covid-19 mirtis, bet perteklines mirtis.

Pasveikusiųjų duomenys yra ypatingai nepatikimi, nes prioritetas visad yra testuoti naujai susirgusius, o ne pasveikusius. Pasveiko gerokai daugiau žmonių nei skelbia oficiali statistika pasaulyje, taigi ir sergančiųjų yra mažiau. Čia pasveikusiųjų skaičius įvertintas teoriškai – jei žmogus per 4 savaites nuo ligos nenumirė – vadinasi pasveiko. Tai nėra tikslu, bet geriau negu oficialūs duomenys.

Posted in LT grafikai | Tagged Covid-19, Dashboard, R

Kiek žmonių išvyko iš tavo savivaldybės?

chart planet Posted on 2021-05-27 by Chart Planet2021-05-30

Čia gali sužinoti kokia dalis žmonių iš tavo savivaldybės išvyko gyventi į kitas Lietuvos savivaldybes.
Arba jei esi iš Neringos, Palangos, Vilniaus ar Kauno – kokia dalis atvyko.

Posted in LT grafikai | Tagged Area chart, Bar chart, Interactive, Tableau

Kur gyvena lietuviai ir kas gyvena Lietuvoje?

chart planet Posted on 2021-04-27 by Chart Planet2021-05-30

Šis grafikas parodo kiek lietuvių gyvena užsienio šalyse ir atvirkščiai – jis nerodo srauto, t.y. migracijos.

Stebina tai, kad Rusijoje ir Lenkijoje gyvena daugiau lietuvių nei Norvegijoje ar Airijoje.

Šaltinis: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2019). International Migrant Stock 2019. (United Nations database, POP/DB/MIG/Stock/Rev.2019).

Posted in LT grafikai | Tagged Network map, R, Ribbon chart

What are the yearly temperature patterns at different latitudes?

chart planet Posted on 2021-04-21 by Chart Planet2021-11-20

In the Northern hemisphere the summer is warmer than the winter (i.e. normal), in the Southern hemisphere the winter is warmer than the summer (i.e. Australian), around the equator there is not much difference during the year.

What: The difference between monthly mean temperature and annual mean temperature.
When: Some weather stations have data since the XVIII century.
Where: All the weather stations in the world binned at each 10th latitude. Only stations with full-year datasets used in calculations.
Source: Global Historical Climatology Network-Monthly (GHCN-M) temperature dataset https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ghcn-monthly

Posted in charts | Tagged Climate, Heatmap, R, SVG editing

Are there any places where the climate is recently getting colder?

chart planet Posted on 2021-04-14 by Chart Planet2021-11-20

The question arises because we’re having Climate Change and not Global Warming.
Only 6 weather stations in the world have a statistically significant negative temperature trend since 2000.
Most of them are located around the equator, one is in Antarctica.
There are 391 weather stations that have at least 5 full years of data since 2000 and which have a significant trend (p-value is less than 5%).
In 385 of those stations, the temperature is rising.

When: 2000 January – 2020 December.
Where: Weather stations that have at least 5 full years of data during the period in question and have a significant regression coefficient (p-value < 5%).
Source: Global Historical Climatology Network-Monthly (GHCN-M) temperature dataset https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ghcn-monthly

Posted in charts | Tagged Bar chart, Climate, Dot chart, R, SVG editing, Symbol map

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