Comment from jeff weir
Time: Monday, July 20, 2009, 4:30 am

I weakly prefer the pie charts, but I’m gonna be a political party pooper here…I don’t think it matters what kind of graph you use to address a question like “Is Mark Sanford more or less ethical than other politicians?” …especially with public opinion being as fickle as it is, and given the lack of any relevent cause and effect relationship between the hypothesis and the variables.

In other words, the data lacks the ’so what’ factor.

Comment from jeff weir
Time: Monday, July 20, 2009, 7:05 am

For sure. Unfortunately these are the kinds of rather meaningless questions that clutter up the newspapers.

In hindsight, it would have been good to ask “Is Michael Jackson more or less ethical than other musicians?” a couple of months ago, then ask it again now, in an attempt to gauge public fickleness or otherwise.

Cheers Jon

Comment from Naomi B. Robbins
Time: Monday, July 20, 2009, 8:31 am

This comment only addresses the color choice where Jon says “using arguably better colors.” I placed the original Excel colors and Jon’s colors in vischeck (www.vischeck.com) to see how vischeck says a person with color vision deficiencies (politically correct term for colorblind) would see them. I’m showing how a deuteranope (one form of color vision deficiency) would see them but the other forms are similar. Note that a reader with color problems cannot distinguish the red and green of PeltierPie2 bit can with ExcelPie2.

Comment from Naomi B. Robbins
Time: Monday, July 20, 2009, 10:14 am

I just want to make it clear that I am not recommending the original Excel default colors. There are many attractive color schemes that all readers can interpret. I also want to take back my comment that the protanope and tritanope were similar to the deuteranope for this example. Clearly, from Jon’s figures above, we notice that the colors they see they are distinguishable.

Comment from Chris Read
Time: Monday, July 20, 2009, 4:46 pm

Jon,

Just popped onto FiveThirtyEight’s website to see what they’re all about. It seems they have employed someone who’s just been shown how to start Excel, given their shockingly novice charting skills. Here’s another to cringe at:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/07/challenge-to-climate-change-skeptics.html

Among the many faults, you’ve got to love a 90 degree head tilt to read x-axis labels…. I look like my West Highland Terrier when he’s trying to work out what I’m saying.

Very interesting comments on VisCheck, I shall definitely be keeping this in mind in future applications!

Chris

Comment from Tim Wilson
Time: Tuesday, July 21, 2009, 7:16 pm

Hah! I read the post and had the same thought Naomi had and went and did some poking around with http://colorfilter.wickline.org/ before I scanned the comments. I checked the most common form of color-blindness, deuteranomaly, which is the most common form (affects ~4.9% of men) and the charts work fine. Deuteranopia affects ~1.1%, and there is an issue there, although I was still able to distinguish between the two wedges in question.

BUT, the larger point…is that color blindness (and “printing on a black-and-white printer” and “photocopying”) is another reason that a bar graph often trumps a pie chart — what takes multiple colors (or horrid patterns, or evil color palettes) in a pie chart can often be done monochromatically with a bar graph.

I actually hope to get around to developing an Excel color palette that is both aesthetically pleasing to people without any color deficiency *and* that works for those with the most common forms of color blindness (there are, I think, four different forms of color blindness that occur in roughly 1% of men or more). I did some experimenting with Excel 2007 a while back to at least check their default palette: http://www.gilliganondata.com/index.php/2009/06/18/data-visualization-that-is-color-blind-friendly-excel-2007/

As for fivethirtyeight.com, some of their sidebar charts during the election actually confused me — lots of information crisply presented, but I often found myself wishing for an easy link to an explanation of how to interpret them.

Comment from Naomi B. Robbins
Time: Tuesday, July 21, 2009, 10:00 pm

Here’s another resource on color. It’s a master’s thesis written under Cindy Brewer.

From http://www.personal.psu.edu/cab38/ColorBrewer/ColorBrewer_updates.html

“Steve Gardner’s Master’s thesis evaluated the ColorBrewer schemes for colorblind readers. I’ve linked his whole thesis with his permission (6.1MB .PDF file or 5.5MB zipped which isn’t smaller but it may download more smoothly). He has recommendations that I have not yet incorporated into the schemes, so I want to get that info out to you. Please cite his work if you find it useful. Also, I hope his work prompts further student research. Steve is now working at the National Geographic Society.”