Visualize This: Poverty Rate By Age in America (Jan 14 to Jan 27)

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Visualize This: Poverty Rate By Age in America (Jan 14 to Jan 27)

Started 3 years ago by nathany / 84 posts

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Luca Masud
Member
Posted 3 years ago #

I read your article and I am at one with you on this but that's not what I was referring to.

Let's take your chart, for example. The one you did here. For sure it's much better than mine in seeing all the data (although I'm not sure that a line chart is the best visualization: there's no time trend here). What kind of new knowledge a generic reader get from that graph? What kind of new subtle correlation between data?

You can explain him what to look for by writing an article under your chart but, maybe, you can do it visually too. And it's just what I'd try to do.
Tim
Member
Posted 3 years ago #

Personally, I don't think the graphic from Luca was effective.

I still can't understand the "ink blots".

For example, the transparency makes more colors on the chart than in the legend which confused me from the start. Also the long lines from each state to each data point are difficult to follow.

Try to see for example the overall poverty rate for Louisiana. ??

OK so maybe the intent was to highlight a single conclusion, rather than use the chart to look at other points. So I can overlook my objection above.

But even so, I would have missed the conclusion without the text in the lower right corner of the contextualization.

So for me this is not effective. If you wish to highlight a single conclusion, the text does it better than any of the graphical elements. If you want to use the graphical elements to understand more than one point, it is too hard.

To me it tried to be a bit of both and succeeded at neither.

If this was for mass consumption in a newspaper for example, I think a better way to demonstrate the conclusion in a graphic would be to simply show:

----
District Of Columbia compared to all US states:

Poverty Ranking = #2 (%people in poverty)
Wealth Ranking = #1 (GDP per capita)
---

Those two facts alone convey the conclusion better than the ink blots chart I think, and ranking is a term everyone understands.

Of course, someone from somewhere other than DC reading that might wonder "how does my state compare". Then you need to show all the states. In that case I think two columns would work better. First column ranks by poverty. Second ranks by wealth. Then draw lines to connect the same state in each column. Steep lines will show the disparity. It would be much simpler.

Just my opinion, I don't mean to sound like a harsh critic. Respectfully submitted comment!! Well done to everyone, I enjoyed looking at them all.
Luca Masud
Member
Posted 3 years ago #

"But even so, I would have missed the conclusion without the text in the lower right corner of the contextualization."

Oh, come on, if one takes his time at checking the peaks and what those points so far away from the others mean (by looking at the axes and the red indicators) he's going to draw the same conclusion. Give me credit at least on this one. Only this one. =D
nathany
FlowingData Editor
Posted 3 years ago #

Ha, the quants are a tough crowd.
whatype
Member
Posted 3 years ago #

Hi everyone,

First of all I must say that I really appreciate your comments about my entree. This has been a really nice challenge and I've learn a great deal from your opinions and works. If I was to do it again taking the same path, I would do it a lot better. Thanks!

I wanted also to public agree with what Luca Masud wrote about the 'goal' of a visualization. I'm an art editor on a newsmagazine and I've been trying to show the 'power' of good visualization to some journalist. I do believe that in a magazine or a newspaper, this days you have to show more (or less, but with greater effect) then the basic graph. Sometimes, it's not about the best way to show data, it's about the best way to engage your readers with that data.

For me, when going for visualizations like the one Luca did (and yes, I'm a huge fan of DensityDesign) a publication is giving more to the readers. Readers nowadays are more willing (and more capable) of 'reading' not so simple charts. I find that information visualization is giving us journalist the tools to 'tell' stories, most of the times, enabling us to 'mix' different data and giving ways for our readers to gain knowledge of a given problem.

So, it's just (as always with design) a matter of finding the best way of solving a problem, of finding a way to communicate something. It is my belief that a 'simple', 'tradicional' graph might not always be the best way to achieve this.
nathany
FlowingData Editor
Posted 3 years ago #

This is from Tom, a FlowingData reader:

I work for a company that makes Geographic Information System software. I got this table into our database and was able to link it to the geographic dataset of the Counties of the U.S. by FIPS code. I made a couple maps of the number of people in each county who are living in poverty. Note, it is not the poverty rate, it is the number. The first image is a thematic map showing the good old light blue to purple color ramp divided up into seven categories by Jenks natural breaks. The second is a cartogram of the same data using the same classification and color ramp. A cartogram is a transformation where each polygon is resized to have an area that is proportional to some value of interest. The cartogram was made using the method developed by Michael Gastner and Mark Newman (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Vol 101, Number 20, pp 7499-7504, May 18, 2004). Mark Newman has more information about this and downloads at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/cart/index.html. There is a great website that uses Mark's program at http://www.worldmapper.org/.

Looking at thematic maps always makes me think of the book "How to Lie with Maps" by Mark Monmonier. Look at the thematic map. It says, "Things aren't so bad. Look at all that light blue." Look at the cartogram. Almost all the light blue is squashed out by the darker more purple colored counties. You can load both .jpeg files in Microsoft Office Picture Manager, and switch back and forth. You can comment at great length at the things you see. The huge size of Los Angeles County. How most of the light blue counties are barely more that their outline in size, but how there are many light blue counties that do have some area to them. Remember, area is people - people in poverty. See how the big counties seem to be clustered around large cities, but how there are very large counties in the very southern tip of Texas with a lot of people in poverty but no city over 350,000 people nearby.

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