Beyond Bar Charts - Data Visualization Best Practices Delivered to the Puget Sound Research Forum in Seattle, WA on Nov 20, 2014

1. Beyond Bar Charts…
Data Visualization
Best Practices
Ben Jones
@DataRemixed
benjones@dataremixed.com
Communicating
Data with Tableau

2. Free Mac & Windows software to quickly create
and share interactive data graphics on the web

3. The “Adam” of Bar Charts

4. William Playfair’s
Commercial and Political Atlas, 1786

5. Inspired by Joseph Priestley’s
Chart of Biography, 1765

8. Which is easier to accurately compare?
Which looks more interesting?

9. There are many ways to encode numerical
information in abstract visual form

10. why go beyond bar charts?
1. Show WHERE
Maps

11. Each bar corresponds to a country, a place
on earth. Is it easy to tell where on earth?

12. John Snow’s Cholera Map, 1854
The broad street pump was identified as the
culprit of the outbreak because of a map

13. Is there a better way to give you an instant
sense of the network of railroads in the US?

15. Where is construction
happening in Seattle?

17. why go beyond bar charts?
2. Show WHEN
Timelines

21. https://data.seattle.gov/Transportation/Fremont-Bridge-Daily-Bicycle-Counts/eytj-7qg9

23. why go beyond bar charts?
3. Show RELATIONSHIPS
Scatterplots

25. Is this the most effective way of showing how refuse
compares with recycling in NYC communities?

33. why go beyond bar charts?
4. Add VARIETY
Design

34. Who wants a world of
mindless uniformity?

35. Is it possible to take
the ordinary and
turn it into
something notable?

36. (accurate but boring)

37. (accurate and interesting)

38. Subtle design treatments can make a
regular bar chart way more fun to look at
http://davideoliveri.github.io/ScoreToChart/

41. …but going “beyond” can put us
in dangerous territory

42. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kühlschifffahrt

43. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pie_chart_of_US_population_by_state.png

44. ?

45. http://flowingdata.com/2014/04/04/fox-news-bar-chart-gets-it-wrong/

46. Protein interaction network
http://phylonetworks.blogspot.com/2012/03/biological-versus-phylogenetic-networks.html

48. so what is “good” in dataviz?
how to know when a visualization is done right

49. what makes for a “good” data
visualization?
1. Truthful
2. Functional
3. Beautiful
4. Enlightening
Slightly modified from Alberto Cairo’s 2014 NICAR talk,
http://www.scribd.com/doc/209593302/NICAR-2014-talk-by-Alberto-Cairo

50. so what does “good” look like?
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/19/upshot/peyton-manning-breaks-touchdown-passing-record.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0

51. three types of data visualizations
exploratory | explanatory | storytelling

53. The 1990s version…
http://www.sabre.org/archives/1994ar/Internet_based_tap.html

54. …and the 2013 version
http://www.itbriefcase.net/infographic-the-incredible-growth-of-web-usage

59. Data Storytelling

60. 6 Types of Data Stories