Food and Drink
30 posts
Someone sent me this via Twitter, found on the Data is Beautiful reddit: The chart does not deliver on its promise: It's tough to know which birds like which seeds. The original chart was also provided in the reddit: I can see why someone would want to remake this visualization. Let's just apply some Tufte fixes to it, and see what happens. Our starting point is this: First, consider the...
This Buzzfeed article proves that foodies love their food served with dataviz (tip: Chris P.). Menus are an undertapped resource when it comes to data visualization. There are several examples worth discussing. Venn diagrams are not easy to read, people. Plus they are hard to construct well... note the asymmetric areas. Here is one without circles: Then, I pared it down to its essence: *** This beer map is pretty...
Another entry in the Google Newslab data visualization project that caught my eye is the "How to Fix It" project, illustrating search queries across the world that asks "how." The project web page is here. The centerpiece of the project is an interactive graphic showing queries related to how to fix home appliances. Here is what it looks like in France (It's always instructive to think about how they would...
Reader Chris P. sent me this chart. This was meant to be "light entertainment." See the Twitter discussion below. *** Let's think a bit about the dot map as a data graphic. Dot maps are one dimensional. The dot's location is used to indicate the latitude and longitude and therefore the x,y coordinates cannot encode any other data. If we have basically a black/white chart, as in this hog map,...
The Schwab magazine has an interesting discussion of a marketing research study purportedly showing "less is more" when it comes to consumer choice. They summarized the experimental setup and results in the following succinct graphic: The data consist of nested proportions. For example, among those seeing display 1, 60% stopped to look at the jams, and among those who stopped, 3% purchased. The nesting is presented as overlap in this...
Someone at YouGov learned an important lesson in what not to do in #dataviz... (Tip from Rob M. via Twitter) The tweet storm it unleashed was not worth the cute idea. Here are their tweets:
Via Twitter, Nicholas S. sent this chart: It's a layered donut. There isn't much context here except that the chart comes from USDA. Judging from the design, I surmise that the key message is the change in proportion by food groups between 1970 and 2014. I am assuming that these food groups are exhaustive so that it makes sense to put them in a donut chart, with all pieces adding...
Between teaching two classes, and a seminar, and logging two coast-to-coast flights, I was able to find time to rethink the following chart from the Wall Street Journal: (link to article) I like the right side of this chart, which helps readers interpret what the alcohol consumption guidelines really mean. When we go out and drink, we order beers, or wine, or drinks - we don't think in terms of...