Source: Information Is Beautiful

I found this data visualization on Information is Beautiful. I believe it is created by the blogs author. I have mixed feelings about it. I wish there was a little text along with the graphic.

I had trouble finding the legend for the y-axis, “Intensity (No. of News Stories).” It blends in a bit too much with the article titles. While it is not critical to know the exact number of stories for each category, I would like to know the range. Is the maximum, 10 stories or 10,000 stories? For me, it is important context.

I also wonder if the mounds represent the number of stories on the legend’s topic or do they represent the specific story listed in quotes? For example, is the number of stories based on the “Millenium Bug” or from the article “Y2K Apocalypse”? Perhaps the labels which occur at peaks just represent a particularly popular story on the topic. It is not clear.

I wonder whether a point of the visualization is to compare story intensity to the number of deaths related to story topic? Number of deaths are listed in legend. I wonder what the source is for that data and for what date range. If the idea was to contrast story intensity to threat, I think this could have been shown in a better way.

The use of the 3d-area charts distorts the results some. I have trouble comparing some of the results. I have trouble also accumulating the stories. How do the total number of red compare to the total orange?

I also question the accuracy of the data. For example, is it true that there have been no news stories about Mad Cow Disease since 2004? Or do they just not turn up on the graph due to scale.

As the source is Google News, does the number of found stories have more to do with the volume of online sources increasing versus the intensity of the reporting?

I tend to focus overly on how the graph could be improved. There are a number of things I like about this visualization. For me, the color scheme was eye catching and interesting. It kept me interested in the data. The overall aesthetics of the visualization are nice from my perspective. For me, it passes the attractiveness test.

The data seems to suggest that intensity of health-related news stories is more intense than technology stories. It also appears with each health scare the intensity is increasing.

The title of the graphic, “Mountains Out of Molehills”, seems to suggest that the conclusion of the analysis is that coverage of stories is disproportionate to the import of the story. This point does not come out for me.

There are the beginnings of a good visualization here. The data and the premise is certainly interesting. Oh, and by the way, I love the Information is Beautiful blog.

Comments