Stephanie Doctor

Good Visualization:

This is from fivethirtyeight. It's a map showing which candidates (nominal) have the most likes on Facebook (continuous) in each county (spatial/nominal). We've seen some examples of visualizations where using both hue and saturation has not been very effective but I think it works here. You can definitely tell the different colors apart (and there's 8!) and also see how some counties are more saturated than others to represent a stronger signal. I think it helps that it's not actually that important to know the intervals represented by saturation quantitatively. The display is interactive so you can deselect certain candidates to see what's underneath; for example, it becomes more interesting when you remove Ben Carson from the map... who knew he had so many Facebook likes!

Bad Visualization 1:

This is an infographic about Valentine's Day from Forbes. First of all, the distracting background combined with the thin white letters makes everything hard to read. The top-right section uses some sort of sizing (area?) to compare dollar amounts (continuous) for different spenders (nominal), which is very hard to compare visually. The bottom-right section is a line graph of total spending on Valentine's Day (continuous) per year (temporal) with no y-axis. Overall the design is cluttered and you have to read most of the numbers to gain any information... with the exception of the bottom-left chart which is okay.

Bad Visualization 2:

This is a map of migration between states in the US. In each state, the top number represents people coming in and the bottom represents people going out. First of all, I'm not sure the numbers need to be there at all, or perhaps they could be condensed to a ratio (which does leave out information about the number of people moving but I think it would be fine without that). Or even better, leave out numbers entirely and do an interval diverging color scheme where one end of the spectrum is for states with people coming in and the other is for states with people leaving. The qualitative color scheme chosen here doesn't make sense... and there should definitely be a legend.

Trees:

I can only really see this being useful if one wanted a very broad sense of the contents of a file tree or wanted to compare it side-by-side with another. The 3D nature of the tree makes it hard to see a lot of the branches in the back or cones facing the back, and without any labels or legends I don't know what the different colors and shapes mean - one would have to be previously trained to understand the diagram. Additionally, you can't tell what the different folders are called - so if you wanted to gain more detail on a certain branch I'm not sure how you'd figure out which one it was.

I have neither given nor received aid while working on this assignment. I have completed the graded portion before looking at anyone else's work on this assignment. Stephanie Doctor