Data labels
37 posts
The editors of ASA's Amstat News certainly got my attention, in a recent article on school counselling. A research team asked two questions. The first was HOW ARE YOU FELINE? Stats and cats. The pun got my attention and presumably also made others stop and wonder. The second question was HOW DO YOU REMEMBER FEELING while you were taking a college statistics course? Well, it's hard to imagine the average...
Here is a typical business chart. A possible story here: institutional investors are generally buying AMD stock, except in Q3 2018. Let's give this chart a three-step treatment. STEP 1: The Basics Remove the data labels, which stand sideways awkwardly, and are redundant given the axis labels. If the audience includes people who want to take the underlying data, then supply a separate data table. It's easier to copy and...
Here is a typical business chart. A possible story here: institutional investors are generally buying AMD stock, except in Q3 2018. Let's give this chart a three-step treatment. STEP 1: The Basics Remove the data labels, which stand sideways awkwardly, and are redundant given the axis labels. If the audience includes people who want to take the underlying data, then supply a separate data table. It's easier to copy and...
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...
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...
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...
I like independent cinema, and here are three French films that come to mind as I write this post: Delicatessen, The Class (Entre les murs), and 8 Women (8 femmes). The French people are taking back cinema. Even though they purchased more tickets to U.S. movies than French movies, the gap has been narrowing in the last two decades. How do I know? It's the subject of this infographic: How do I...
Kaiser Fung (JunkCharts, Principal Analytics Prep) finds a visual design that highlights the insights from data comparing ticket sales of U.S. movies versus French movies in France.
I've attended a number of talks in the last couple of days at the Joint Statistical Meetings. I'd like to offer some advice to presenters using graphics in their presentations. Here is an example of the style of graphics that are being presented. (Note: I deliberately picked an example from a Google image search - this graphic was not used in a presentation but is representative of those I've seen.)...
NPR has this chart, which I like: It's a small multiples of bumps charts. Nice, clear labels. No unnecessary things like axis labels. Intuitive organization by Major Factor, Minor Factor, and Not a Factor. Above all, the data convey a strong, surprising, message - despite many high-profile gun violence incidents this year, some Democratic voters are actually much less likely to see guns as a "major factor" in deciding their...