Categories

Here’s the ongoing 10QViz community CONVERSATION about CATEGORIES
Defining
the
CATEGORIES
Question

“Save the pies for dessert”?

Arzu Coltekin July 13, 2018

Included in Stephen Few’s very interesting visualization blog (perceptual edge) is the provocatively titled “Save the Pies for Dessert” post.   Pie charts are notoriously bad for perceptually judging magnitude. Here is an annotated excerpt from Few’s post, giving just one example of how hard it can be to judge scale using pie charts…

Not everyone hates pie charts, though…for example, here is a blog post from “Junk Charts” on the downside of discouraging pie charts.

Bonus: An amusing pie chart which shows the shadow illusion featured in the Categories question is this fascinating little image. Once you see the pyramid, you cannot unsee it:

 

Pyramid pie chart art.

I did not manage to identify the original maker of this -sort of- meme at this point, if you know, please tell me in the comments. Image above is copied from Rebecca Barter here: http://www.rebeccabarter.com/blog/2015-07-23-pie/

Another case made against the rainbow colors

Arzu Coltekin July 13, 2018

Rainbow colors are pretty, and many of us like them. However, go to any visualization-related conference, and you’ll hear a lot of ‘rainbow-hate’. Where does that come from? Below is an excellent example that shows how rainbow color tables might mislead and make us see categories, or patterns, that might not be there. The image below is featured in a blog post titled “How The Rainbow Color Map Misleads” by Robert Kosara, in his wonderful visualization and visual communication blog eagereyes:

There is more to the art and science of choosing colors. Here is another informative post by Lisa Charlotte Rost: https://blog.datawrapper.de/colors/

Maybe a treemap would be better?

Alyssa Goodman July 12, 2018

Consider this infographic about imprisonment, from this article on the American Legislative Exchange Council blog.   Most people would look at it and find it very engaging and attractive, which it is.  But, as a visualization expert, one wonders if the odd coloring variations in the outer ring of the main figure and in the “Juvenile” block at right, which just show how the larger wedges (categories) divide up more finely  (into sub-categories) wouldn’t be better shown in a Tree Map, using the ideas about showing hierarchical categories proposed by Ben Shneiderman in the 199os.   A Tree Map version of these data would almost certainly show the area of sub-categories and categories relative to each other (context) better than the snazzy graphic shown here.

The Periodic Table of Visualization

Alyssa Goodman July 12, 2018

In 2007, for their paper entitled Towards a Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management, Lengler & Eppler created the static graphic shown here. Later, Chris Wallace created an interactive javascript version, now hosted at the excellent visual-literacy.org web site. 

Visualization studiesThis fun table has SO much to teach us about visualization–just think about all the 10QViz “Questions” to which it directly relates…

Primarily–the highly successful table is about “explaining” what’s meant by different kinds of visualization, but it (especially the interactive display mode) also let’s a user “explore” how those visualizations relate to each other.   The table’s two dimensional layout, mimics the periodic table of the elements,  familiar to most viewers  (cf. “Who?”), and suggests (and labels) categorical groupings (shown in patterns of color and position).   The interactivity adds hugely rich “metadata,” by way of examples for each cell in the table.

Reference for the Original Table: “Towards A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management”
Lengler R., Eppler M. (2007). Towards A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management. IASTED Proceedings of the Conference on Graphics and Visualization in Engineering (GVE 2007), Clearwater, Florida, USA. More on the history of the interactive version of the table can be found in this blog.