Datawrapper

Datawrapper is widely used by journalists, and was created by journalists, to

Enrich your stories with charts, maps, and tables.

• It’s free (there is a paid plan but it targets larger organisations)
• It provides well designed and sensible defaults making it easy to create a good-looking chart
• Charts will continue online if you close your account
• Fantastic blog - well worth reading to get you started thinking about what makes a good chart
  • Read In defense of simple charts

Sidebar: Flourish

Many New Zealand news organisation use Datawrapper. But Flourish is also popular. e.g

• The Post
• 1News

Flourish and Datawrapper are very similar tools. Datawrapper is focused on static charts, Flourish provides more interactive options.

What is a chart?

• Or what makes something a visualisation as opposed to a graphic?

What is a chart?

A chart (sometimes known as a graph) is a graphical representation for data visualization, in which “the data is represented by symbols, such as bars in a bar chart, lines in a line chart, or slices in a pie chart”.

Why use charts?

• Context
• Clarity
• Correctness - reveal thing’s that are hidden by summary statistics

Exercise

• Company A has 10 employees. Each employee earns $100,000 per year. What is the average salary?

• Company B has 10 employees. 9 employees earn $10,000 per year. 1 employee earns $910,000 per year. What is the average salary?

• Company A has a good year and applies an average salary increase of 10% - everyone now earns $110,000.

• Company B has a good year and applies an average salary increase of 10% - 9 people still earn $10,000 and 1 person earns $1,010,000.

Digressions — Why?

All summary statistics hide things

The mean and standard deviation are the same for each of these graphs

Chart choice

• Different charts will highlight different aspects of your data more effectively.
• Choose the chart that shows the aspect of the data that you are interested in
• Line and Bar charts are often a safe choice
• Take care with maps and pie charts

FT Visual Vocabulary

Bad or deceiving charts

• Charts and graphs can be used to deceive
  • Don’t do this.

The best way to get a sense for bad charts is to peruse vis.wtf or /r/dataisugly. There is also a good writeup here

The most common bad things are:

• Incorrect, missing, or misleading labels
• Inconsistenct scales
• Truncating scales
• Comparing things that shouldn’t be
• Too many things

A few rules

• Barcharts always start at 0
• Line charts don’t need to start at 0, but always ask yourself if the range you select is going to make an insignificant change look important
• Only use pie charts for parts of a whole and only when there are less than 5 categories
• Avoid maps for showing quantities
• LABELS

Exercises

• Locator maps
• Graph company A and B from above
• Recreate a chart from Figure.NZ
  • Add /data.csv to a url
• Titles, captions, and alt-text
• Annotations