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I think labeled bar charts are worse than maps and cartograms for conveying coarser grained information. Bar charts beyond a single row are hard to compare bec
by Eridrus 11y ago
I think labeled bar charts are worse than maps and cartograms for conveying coarser grained information.
Bar charts beyond a single row are hard to compare because they use height rather than colour and they don't say anything about the location (e.g. I don't really know where wyoming is).
They also don't say anything about population size, which is what this article is about. You could do some height + colour thing to get the same effect, but then you're just building a crappy cartogram.
- danso 11y ago> You could do some height + colour thing to get the same effect, but then you're just building a crappy cartogram. Yeah, that's what I meant. The spectrum for a cartogram has total geographical fidelity on one end, to total abstraction on the other. The latter would basically be a bar chart in which the geographical data has been basically ignored. On the more abstract side, the Guardian did a radial chart for U.S. gay rights...the positions around the circle corresponded roughly to regions, i.e. "Northeast" is the top-right of the circle. Of course, it has all the problems inherent to radial charts...but it's a nice example of something that could be a bar chart (a horizontal array of blocks) that attempted to include some geo-positioning data, even at a very general level: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/10/data-visualisation-us-gay-rights http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/10/data-vi...
- jalammar 11y agoWhat about a horizontal bar chart (ordered by value)? Yes you'll have to scan the list to find Wyoming, but it would better relate how Wyoming compares to West Virginia (which seems to have almost the same size square in the cartogram).