Graphical Purgatory?

Today, I learned the term: Graphical Purgatory from this amazing book:

And on chapter 5, it had the following sentence:

“Along with proliferation of graphing options has come an abundance of chart junk, decoration, and inappropriate graphics.”

Is this true? I highly think so. And we can avoid it.

Let’s see the example data that they used for this chapter:

And now, let’s see the first example they showed when plotting this data:

Yikes! Can we do better? Of course, we can.

Here’s are my make overs inspired from the examples in the chapter of this book, using Power BI:

Lessons learned from reading chapter 5 from Making Sense of Data:

1. 1. 1. Good graphics should amplify and clarify a table of values, not compete with it.
      2. There are two types of confusion: one is confusion about what is being represented and the other type is decorated confusion.
      3. If the graph is not easier to understand than the table of numbers, then the graph is a failure.
      4. There are two types of ink: one is used for decoration and the other one to represent the data.
      5. When ornamentation overwhelms the message, the result is pure chart junk.
      6. It is very easy for the decoration to overwhelm the data.
      7. Decoration is not analysis.

Last, but not least, the following image is from the same chapter and it’s on radar plots:

I’m still mind-blown by the difference. Avoid radar charts.

And that’s it for today, see you tomorrow.