Visualization – Donald Marron

Spaghetti, Pies, and Clutterplots: Visualizing Data

Jonathan Schwabish has just published a wonderful guide to visualizing economic data. If you produce charts, you really ought to study it.

Here’s one example, transforming a default Excel “spaghetti” chart into something more tasty:

Getting the Most from Excel Charts

Over at The Why Axis, Jon Schwabish has a great show-and-tell on improving economic visuals in Excel. He starts with a chart of job openings data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that was clearly made using Excel’s default settings (click charts to enlarge):

Jon demonstrates many improvements. I particularly like this one:

To my eye, this chart is way better than the original, although it shares one big flaw: the horizontal spacing of the dots doesn’t match the timing. Jon then corrects that and adds more information (I might have stopped with just getting the spacing right):

Check out his original post for an easy guide to the how and why of these changes and a copy of his Excel file.

200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes

Courtesy of the BBC. here’s the newest version of Hans Rosling’s famous presentation on economic growth and life expectancy. Keep an eye out for the moments in history when life expectancy plummets.

Google’s Public Data: Much Improved

Google recently released some major improvements in its public data efforts. If you click on over to Public Data, you will find a much broader range of data sets including economic information from the OECD and World Bank, key economic statistics for the United States, and some education statistics for California. Google has also included more tools for visualizing these data, from standard line charts to the evolving bubble charts that have made Hans Rosling such a hit at TED.

As an example, I made a flash chart of state unemployment rates from 1990 to the present. Puerto Rico (which counts as a state for these purposes), Michigan, Nevada, and Rhode Island currently have the highest unemployment rates, so I thought it would be interesting to see how they stacked up against the other states over the past twenty years.

WordPress doesn’t allow me to embed Flash, but if you click on the image above and then click play, you will see the evolution of state unemployment rates over time. (Spoiler alert: All those colored bars move sharply upward toward the end of the “movie”.)

Long-time readers may recall my series of posts criticizing Google for directing its users to unemployment data that have not been seasonally adjusted. Happily, Google now allows the user to use either seasonally adjusted or non adjusted data. Two cheers for Google.

Why only two cheers rather than three? Because Google still directs unsuspecting users to unadjusted data–without the ability to switch to seasonally adjusted–if they do a Google search on “unemployment rate United States“. That’s a big deal, particularly for February 2010 when the official unemployment rate was 9.7%, but the unadjusted figure reported by Google was 10.4%.

Clearly, the two parts of Public Data need to integrate a bit more.