Junk Charts

For more reading on poor viz & better redesigns, I recommend Junk Charts by Kaiser Fung: https://junkcharts.typepad.com/

The broken-out slice of the pie chart is badly distorted. The slice is broken up into rings for each percentage, but the rings are sized by their width, not their area, so the areas are way off. It says 57% Facebook. The width of the entire slice is 500 pixels, and Facebook's width is about 285 pixels - that's 57% of the width. But the area of the Facebook ring is obviously much greater than 57% of the entire slice. In fact, since the area varies with the square of the radius, the inner rings all combined (43%) are only 18.5% of the area, and the Facebook ring is 81.5% of the area! Or consider the two slices that are supposed to represent 13% each. The inner blue slice is 6.37% of the total area, and the red slice next to it is 8.88%. That's 40% bigger than the other slice that is supposed to represent the same amount. Using widths that give correct areas would be misleading visually too, because the widths would then look wrong. Facebook's 57% would be only 34% of the width, and the inner rings combined would be 66% of the width. I think the only way to fix this and stick with the pie representation would be to make the sections angles of the slice instead of rings within it. For anyone who wants to make better charts by learning what not to do, I recommend the Junk Charts blog which picks apart all sorts of bad charts. I've learned a lot from it and it's entertaining too: http://junkcharts.typepad.com/

Related - Kaiser Fung has a long-running blog on bad graphs: https://junkcharts.typepad.com/

I'm a big fan of Junk Charts, as they discuss the exact failings of the carts in some detail, and how to improve them. http://junkcharts.typepad.com/

My favorite chart lately: http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/2014/04/conventions-novelty-…

http://flowingdata.com/ http://junkcharts.typepad.com/ for examples.

Very grateful for your notification of the existence of visualcapitalist.com (It also has RSS, though through an external provider) I wanted to reciprocate revealing something along the lines, but apart from ourworldindata.org (which has a numeric approach instead of notional), I can only find the promising JunkChart, https://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/ , and The Economist's Graphic Detail, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail?page=1 , blogs. Edit: the said branch of The Economist seems very promising: the latest article, "Just like modern humans, honeybees avoid each other amid plagues // They segregate behaviours in different parts of their hives to prevent parasites from spreading" as a stub shout heading reads «Social distan-sting». Thank you dear editor!

And then there's this, about that paper: http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/2010/05/8-red-flags-about-th… Edit: And this http://junkcharts.typepad.com/numbersruleyourworld/2010/05/more-questi…

For those of you who want to read a bit more about the twin cities traffic metering program there's an entertaining chapter in Numbers Rule Your World that goes through the history and (very lightly) the stats behind it. http://junkcharts.typepad.com/numbersruleyourworld/

Not in a web device/timeframe combination to give this a proper look, but definitely like what I briefly had a chance to read. Already saved to revisit later. For anyone else that enjoyed this and is not aware of Parallel Sets: http://eagereyes.org/parallel-sets Personally, I've found few good real-world use cases for PSets. But I've found it to be helpful for experimenting, even though I rarely use it for any end-product charts. [edit: One last thing before I'm out of range. I'm sure most folks interested in this are familiar, but if not... BumpCharts: http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/2005/07/in_praise_of_th.html ]