Hanna's Makeover Monday 2019w16 - bars bars (bars)

by Hanna Nykowska

After a bit of a break (I still haven’t finished my 2019w15 Makeover Monday, but don’t worry, I’m getting there), I’m back with my blogs.

This week focuses on the words used in the Info we Trust by RJ Andrews. The original visualisation is shown below:

What doesn’t work?

First of all, I don’t even know what I’m looking at. It is a word cloud, fine, but I don’t know where do the words come from. What are they representing? I simply don’t know.

Another thing is the colours. Just too many. Way too many.

What does work?

Even though a word cloud may not be the best chart type, it is quite intuitive. The fact that data is by far the biggest and in the horizontal orientation is helping focus the attention.

How can I improve it?

I thought I’d definitely want to add some information, at least where is the data coming from and what is the viz showing. I’m not convinced using all of the words is the best idea since some are barely noticeable and just add clutter without adding extra information.

Below you can see my makeover:

Interactive viz

In here, I focused on the top 10 words by count and their use throughout the book. During our Makeover Monday session in the Data School, Robert had pointed out that some of the sections are longer than others. To accommodate for this I just wrote an LOD that calculated word count per page. This allowed comparing the word concentration in different sections of the book. (If you don’t know what LODs are or just want some extra clarification, stay tuned because I’ll be writing a blog post on it very soon!)

In my viz I also incorporated the colours of the book itself which is always a nice touch:

That’s it from me for now. It seems that I’m catching up with my blog posts so expect more content soon 🙂

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Hanna Nykowska

Fri 24 May 2019

Thu 23 May 2019