Hey folks, This week I have an interesting figure for you from the Financial Times from an e-mail newsletter they distribute each week describing some visualization related to climate change. Before reading further, go ahead and spend a few minutes with the image. What does it say to you? What do you like? What don’t you like about it? How do you think you would go about making it in R? I’d encourage you to write down any of your answers to these questions before reading what I have to say. It would be awesome if you could send me your responses just to get a sense of what other people see (feel free to reply to this email!) What does it say to me? I like the declarative title that “China accounts for almost a third of the current global emissions with a cumulative share of 16%”. What do you like? I’m not a huge fan of stacked area plots, but they did a nice job of focusing on a set of countries/regions of interest. Too often I see people try to include too many categories leading to too many colors, which makes it impossible to know which color belongs to each country. What don’t you like? All that being said, I think the legend could have been better embedded into the panels so that one doesn’t have to scan back and forth. Also, the colors are basically reddish and greenish. I get that EU27, Russia, and UK are all European-ish and could be similar colors. But why are China and US similar colors? In addition to labelling the areas directly, I’d try to pick five distinct colors. How would I make this in R? Good question! I can think of a hack approach and a more elegant approach. The hack would be to create two sets of data that are either scaled by year or over the past 175 years. Then I would use The more elegant approach would be to use Regardless of the approach to making the two panels, each panel has a stacked area plot. We can use Happily, I was able to find the data! If you go to the data hub of the Global Carbon Budget, we can download an To get the data into R, I’d use the This would be my general approach. What did you come up with? Any preference for trying to do this with
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Hey folks! I’m in proposal writing mode again. Unfortunately, I am finding my weekly search for a data visualization to share with you is leading me down unproductive internet rabbit holes. So, I thought I’d share an idea with you that I hope resonates. If you have any reactions, please send them my way! For the past year or so I have been recreating other people’s data visualizations in an attempt to learn new techniques with R and expand the type of data that I normally visualize. The idea...
Hey folks! Here in the US, vaccines continue to be a hot button issue. I feel like this issue is really an amalgamation of multiple issues including the decline in respect for authority figures, frustration with COVID, inability to assess risk at a personal level, and parents feeling like they are losing rights. Do people really want their kids to get sick unnecessarily? I doubt it. It’s also in the news because the Secretary of Health and Human Services is a vaccine skeptic/denier with many...
Hey folks! Sorry for the hiatus in getting you a newsletter into your inbox. The end of the summer/beginning of the academic year has been pretty chaotic. Actually, I had what I thought would be an interesting plot to recreate, but then I wasn’t able to find the original data and I wasn’t really interested in simulating it. Oh well. I’m also finding it hard to come up with interesting data visualizations from out in the wild. One of my go-to’s, Philip Bump, stopped working for the Washington...