For Those Who Love Graphs
I’d like to share with you a chart that can help you decide what’s the best way to graph the data that you’re dealing with.
The picture comes from Andrew Abela, who hosts a blog called Extreme Presentation.
I think it’s a great baseline, and while I don’t agree 100% on everything (like the use of pie charts), I think this covers most every situation you’ll come up against in chart design.
We ran across a good article on BusinessWeek a few weeks ago that shows us how graphs can easily be misused to demonstrate trends which may not exactly be connected.
This highlights the problem when people assume causation when it comes to trends in our societal data.
Click through to the article to see all the graphs.
Here at GraphGraph, you may know that we’re not big fans of Pie Charts.
That being said, I do think that this animated pie chart gives a really interesting view on the music industry.
I think that I mainly like it because it looks like Pac-Man, if Pac-Man represented the music industry collapsing upon itself every few years.
I believe that the original source is this post. If I’m wrong, please do let me know!
For today’s GraphLink, the Web Comic XKCD posted a graph on Friday about Christmas songs.
Of course, XKCD is no stranger to graphs and interesting visualizations.
Every month we’re going to attempt to do a meta-review of the site, using graphs of course.
Visitors
We had a “soft launch” towards the end of October with a few hits, but we really took off in November, starting with a post about my Halloween Candy experiences this year, which was shared out by Geekadelphia.
Red bars represent days with new posts, and Blue bars are days without new posts.
We thought an interesting stat to look at would be the number of pageviews per visitor. On days where the diamond is above 1, it represents where on average people clicked on something else within the site beyond just their initial entry page. The highest day for that was 11/10/2011, when Drew had his post on Scrabble.
All in all, we’re very happy that in our first month we had 737 visits and 1,049 pageviews. Thank you!
Visits by Post
Posts:
(266) – my halloween candy in graphs
(222) – site index
(161) – most valuable cities in ticket to ride
(85) – what word should i play
(62) – top 10 most popular cities in north america
(50) – most populous city by state
(33) – better than watching the detroit lions
(23) – geotagging visualization of philadelphia
(18) – twitter on 11-11-11
(12) – graphs we love: espn’s stats info twitter
(9) – graphlink: invisible bread
(4) – nfl championships per year
(1) – stanley cup 2011 sparklines
(1) – welcome to graphgraph
(102) – category, tag, & author pages (we kept this separate to keep the focus on individual posts or the site index)
Twitter, Facebook & Google Reader
Right now that chart is pretty barren. However in future months we’ll see a line chart (with hopefully a lot of growth).
Facebook – 5 Likes -> Click here to like us
Twitter – 6 Followers > Click here to follow us
Google Reader – 7 Subscribers -> Click here to access the RSS feed and add us to your favorite reader
Thanks again to everyone for making this first month a success!
Facebook has a great post up from their Data team about relationships between people, and more specifically concluding that the majority of Facebook users are only four degrees of separation away from anyone else on the social networking site.
From the article:
We found that six degrees actually overstates the number of links between typical pairs of users: While 99.6% of all pairs of users are connected by paths with 5 degrees (6 hops), 92% are connected by only four degrees (5 hops). And as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become steadily more connected. The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74.
Very fascinating findings! Read the full article for more information and some additional charts that tie everything together. And while you’re there, how about you go ahead and “Like” us on Facebook? Awesome! Thanks.
Let’s start this off with some honesty. I used to love pie charts. I thought they were great, just like the way I used to think Comic Sans was the best font ever.
But then I had some #RealTalk, and I’ve been enlightened in the error of my ways, and I want to pass on what I’ve learned to show people why pie charts aren’t the best choice for visualization. For my day job, part of my work involves creating visualizations out of business data for our customers. I picked up a copy of “Information Dashboard Design” a book by Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge. If you’re at all interested in data visualization, I highly recommend his books, and on this site we attempt to use a lot of the principles in creating the visualizations we present to you.
But speaking specifically of Pie Charts, here’s why they’re a bad choice for your and your data:
It’s Hard To Do Comparisons
With a pie chart, the size of the angle determines the proportion on the data. Everything adds up to a nice cool, crisp 100%. But what if you want to know the exact numbers? Well, you’re going to need data labels attached to your data, which can take up space and be cumbersome.
Look at these pie charts. Can you tell me the exact value of each of the slices? Can you order the colors from largest to smallest in each chart?
The above video was posted on the official Twitter blog and is an interesting use of geospacial visualization over time.
A few things you can gain from the video:
Hat Tip to @HashTagOnions for the link.
If you’re a fan of both sports and graphs, then we recommend that you follow ESPN’s Stats and Info Twitter account, @ESPNStatsInfo. It’s a good source of timely sports anecdotes and they’ll share out some interesting graphs, including baseball heatmaps.
If you love sports and graphs, we think they’re worth a follow.
The United States has a lot of people in it. However, we wanted to take a look at what was the most populous city within each state, and graph it out.
We took a look only at incorporated cities (as opposed to metropolitan areas) and found some interesting results, especially towards the bottom.
Familiar cities like Boise (ID) and Salt Lake City (UT) are outside the top 100, while cities like Portland (ME) and Cheyenne (WV) aren’t even in the top 500. Burlington, the most populous city in VT, didn’t even crack the top 1000.
Data was compiled from the Census (via Wikipedia 1 2) for cities with population over 100,000 and the World Gazetteer for the remaining Top 1000 cities.
Here’s a text file of the data.
We think taking a look at this in a bar chart gives real perspective on the differences from state-to-state.
