Who Votes for Donut Charts?
John Peltier would be jumping up and down if he were here, seeing Geoffrey Draper present his work on visualizing exit poll data. He's using what is essentially a donut chart for the data. The interaction is not bad, but the visualization is really close to useless. You can't see different subsets at the same time, and the donut makes comparing between different categories difficult. There are much better ways to show this kind of data, like Parallel Sets. Their goal was for this to be useful for non-experts, which it undoubtedly was – but I wonder if a better visualization might get close in that regard and still be a better visualization.
Comments
At first glance, Figure 1 in
At first glance, Figure 1 in Draper's paper indicates that 33% of the voters voted for Proposition 1, 33% for Referendum 1, and 33% for Salt Lake City Mayor. Figure 5 takes the three segments of Figure 1 to its illogical conclusion of 13 segments. Squeezing all categorical analyses into a single donut ring makes it very difficult to compare breakdowns between categories, and also forces the user to ignore any analysis of interactions between categories, such as, how voting for mayor differed between men and women, or how marital status affected approval of a referendum. The visualization is so bad in so many ways, I didn't waste any time looking at the videos.
Parallel Sets
Hi, I'm interested in your work on parallel sets - I noticed that elsewhere (http://flowingdata.com/2008/08/29/a-case-for-open-source-data-visualization to be precise) you've mentioned releasing the code that your papers have been based on - is this anywhere nearer happening, or could you even direct me to a commercially available application that allows data presentation in this form?
Many thanks for this interesting technique!