Hey folks, Are you looking for more personalized support and coaching to help you develop your data analysis skills? Are you looking for help in leading a data science team where your folks aren’t super proficient in analyzing data? Let me know what you’re looking for and we can discuss how I might be able to help you. Unfortunately, this wouldn’t be a free service. But, I’m confident I can help you get over the challenges that are keeping you from creating data analyses and visualizations that you are proud of. Let me know by replying to this email. I really hate stacked bar plots. Unfortunately, one of my most popular videos is how to make a stacked bar plot! I even tell people that there are better ways of representing data than with a stacked bar plot. Oh well. Today, I want to share a stacked bar plot that I think would be fun to recreate and think about how we could make it better. This visualization was published online two years ago and comes to us from YouGov. This is a horizontal stacked bar plot showing whether people love, like, dislike, hate or don’t know if they like one of 30 card games. It also has text annotation to indicate the size of each of the bars. If you want the data, you can copy and paste it from a PDF with their data. Incidentally, embedding data in a PDF is a sure sign to me that people don’t want you to actually use the data for secondary purposes. Thankfully, this is a nice PDF that we can copy and paste and with some regular expressions in RStudio, we can convert to a tibble. The data will come in wide format with the different sentiment types across the columns, the games in the rows, and the cells the level of sentiment for each game. We can tidy the data using By default, We’d also like to add the level of sentiment for each game to each of the bars. Well, except for those bars with less than 4% support. I’d start by making a There’s a number of interesting stylings that we’ll be able to implement in the Now, how could we improve this figure? The main problem with stacked bar plots is that it is difficult to compare the internal bars across groups. Sure the numbers are there, but it’s not as efficient as comparing the length of a bar that is anchored on either side. One solution would be to convert this to a dot plot where we’d use the same x and y-axis aesthetic mappings, but we’d use As an aside, I’m struck by the preference for solitaire and the overall dislike of bridge. Solitaire is a single person game that at one point (perhaps still?) came on every windows computer. There’s little strategy. Bridge is a very social game that I associate with the “greatest generation”. Couples would get together regularly to play with each other and there were newspapers columns about bridge strategy along side columns about chess strategy. It’s hard to not see this as some referrendum on our social media world where we think we’re participating in a community, but really we’re growing more and more isolated. What’s your favorite card game?
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Hey folks! As I’m writing this newsletter the US government is in shutdown mode with no clear signs that things will get going anytime soon. I’ll withhold my own political take except to say that my family has been running without an official budget for about 25 years. I don’t recommend it, but we know basically how much money goes to our mortgage, insurance, groceries, charities, etc. and how much money we generally have left over. Somehow we still are able to spend money on living a pretty...
Hey folks! This week I have a figure for you from the New York Times based on a poll they did with Siena that describes Americans’ sentiments concerning Israel’s actions in their war with Gaza. What does it say to me? This plot is saying that more Americans think that Israel is intentionally killing civilians than they did in December 2023. The change in percentage of people in the other categories seems to decrease accordingly. What do you like? I love slope plots! I think they’re a great...
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....