The Data Visualisation Catalogue: find the right method for your data
datavizcatalogue.com
datavizcatalogue.com
Looking at the selection for proportions [0] there are things like circle packing or bubble maps presented as options. These are terrible ways to encode visual data if the intent is for the audience to actually take an interest in the data itself. Humans are really bad at interpreting the relative size of areas, especially circles. They really only make sense if the intent is to wow the audience that you have data and design skills, then everyone moves on without asking tough questions. Fair enough, sometimes that is the right thing to do, but it isn't a good way to visualise data. Use bars.
[1] https://www.data-to-viz.com/
Note: In the about page, they provide an extensive list of historical chart classification schemes :).
Is this a reference to age alone, or some particular attitude or propensity for outdated methods? Or is this description for wizards?
This is one of my favorites. Very straightforward
Much better!
direction matters. most sankey diagrams could be pie charts (eg the birthday sankey) and dumb usages discredit useful viz techniques.
nested boxes are usually trees, and mixed nested boxes with lines without symmetry are almost always lazy reasoning or bullshit. start with symmetry and intent and it will be apparent.
Similar to a graph of nodes with a time component.
I have been scratching my head around this visualization problem it has been some time, and still haven’t found anything that would be applicable
Say you have 5 event types, which occur with various frequencies over time. Plot them as dots on the staff.
Draw lines between events which link to each other.
If you draw the lines for the staff, they should be faint, only to help classify the event.
And you can of course have more than 5 event types, just add more lines. Hopefully less than 20 lines, otherwise this starts to get visually very messy.
If you have 10 to 20 nodes without a ton of edges you could use a fixed circular layout for the nodes on a timeline that just the edges change over time.
More than this and you start getting into hairball territory even without the changes over time. A hairball changing over time is even more useless than a hairball on its own.
The standard force directed layout is really quite useless other than seeing the global structure of the graph. The uselessness is more obvious when you try to change it over time. I suspect the layout is so standard because the visualization looks so cool.
Most data visualization though has this same problem. There is almost this property that the cooler and more beautiful the visualization is, the more useless it is as far as containing any insight about the data itself.