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Comment by nicpottier | Hacker News Reader

Jesus, is that visualization supposed to help? I stared at it for minutes and I still don't really grok it. Seems like it is trying to channel a similar method as the Napolean March: http://bryanrulli.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/tufte_napolean...

But failing completely at it.

In any case, is this a common type of visualization now? Maybe with some experience it becomes easy to grok what is happening?

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No, it's not common to see this kind of visualisation. Bad visualisations? Yeah, they're pretty common. The usual mistake is overuse of Pie Charts.

I'd recommend the OP (and anyone else who has an interest in communication) to read:

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Visual-Display-Quantitative-Info...

Information Dashboard Design http://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effecti...

Now You See http://www.amazon.co.uk/Now-You-See-Stephen-Few/dp/097060198...

Ironically, the OP recommends that you read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, as well. I suspect that the mediocre example (I thought it was reasonably readable and somewhat interesting) was there more as a demonstration of the fact that R makes non-scatter plots easily, too.

It's from http://www.jasondavies.com/parallel-sets/ and is one of the example plots for http://d3js.org/

I must say that the icicle plot of the same data is way more readable. The crisscrossing lines are all but useless to get a feel of the data.

go to http://www.jasondavies.com/parallel-sets/ and click on icicle plot to see what is going on.

I eventually figured it out, but there was no AHA! about it. I had to slowly pick it apart every step of the way, like working through an obfuscated C contest entry.

A dot chart would have been substantially better. I haven't seen that sort of visualization before. It's probably a mistake to try to show the relative size of each group in the same picture as the absolute size.

I've seen a clearer version of the same chart; when it doesn't show children it is much easier to understand what is going on.

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