A few weeks ago I was in Indianapolis with the juvenile detention alternatives initiative. This group wanted to graph: how many youth went to juvenile detention centers, by gender, and by quarter. Brainstorming There are a dozen ways to graph each dataset. For this data,…
“Ann, my bar chart is upside down! Help!” You read my prior post about using horizontal bar charts for nominal variables like favorite fruits. My toddler is eating two! bananas a day so bananas are the winner in this fictional fruit contest. Our original table…
This morning I keynoted a conference in Tallahassee. Data visualizers who critique others before critiquing themselves make me gag, so I opened my talk with a trip down memory lane. Check out this beauty from one of my earliest jobs. I’ve anonymized it but 99.9% of…
“Ann, I read your latest post, and I accidentally made a horizontal bar chart when it should’ve been a vertical bar chart! Am I going to have to delete my graph and start from scratch?” No way. Don’t delete a thing. That would be a huge…
“Ann, should my bar charts be horizontal or vertical?” Ordinal variables get vertical bars Ordinal variables follow a natural progression—an order. I arrange ordinal categories from left to right so my viewers can view the sequence across the page, which means their bars are vertical. Use…