Building Custom Data Visualizations

Chart Brainstorming Solution, Part 1

Shirley Wu

Shirley Wu

Data Sketches
Building Custom Data Visualizations

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The "Chart Brainstorming Solution, Part 1" Lesson is part of the full, Building Custom Data Visualizations course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson:

Shirley reviews the audience's brainstorming chart sketches that explore potential ideas to visualize the data.

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Transcript from the "Chart Brainstorming Solution, Part 1" Lesson

[00:00:00]
>> Shirley Wu: Okay I'm really, really, really excited about this. These are some of the sketches that came out of the break. And so the ask was just to sketch out some simple charts to do the exploration. Just think of some of the questions and then what charts might be good.

[00:00:19]
And so what I want to do is go through some of these and then maybe do two or three of these in Vega Lite. I'm going to have to admit that I''m not going to remember how to do all of them off the top of my memory in Vega Lite so there might be some searching of the documentation together.

[00:00:40]
But I think that will be good because inevitably, that's something that we're going to have to do. So this one is beautiful. But looking at the question of is there any relationship between the number of wins and popularity. I think some of these are symbols, so number of wins, so rating type?

[00:01:04]
So it's like IMDB rating, meta score versus Rotten Tomatoes, that would be really, really interesting. That's a great one and then sized by the box office number of wins, ratings. So this one is looking at box office and production company, is it? And then bucket the number of wins, sorry can you explain this one a little bit more or.

[00:01:29]
>> Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this one is less well thought out. Originally I was thinking a distribution by box office sales, and then you can have a stacked chart that showed the number of wins. Kind of thought that maybe 0 to 5 is light blue, 5 to 10 is dark blue.

[00:01:49]
>> Shirley Wu: Okay,
>> Shirley Wu: I think maybe for this one, so you're saying it's a histogram and the x-axis is box office figures, right? And so bucket the number of wins. Actually I think maybe it should be that the colors are the production companies. Cuz the production companies are categorical and specific colors are really great for categorical.

[00:02:24]
Let's see some of these others. So, and then there's also these are movies by release date. Okay, so out of these, which one are you most curious about to just kind of give a try?
>> Speaker 3: I like the bottom left one with just the histogram of ratings, and then you could bucket total wins by genre.

[00:02:49]
>> Shirley Wu: So this, wait, left one?
>> Speaker 3: That one.
>> Shirley Wu: Okay, cool. So total wins, so percent readings, and then so this is going to be, okay, it's going to be numbered. And then color by genre. So let's do this one together. But let's start out a little bit simpler.

[00:03:12]
Let's take out the genre part, let's not color by genre first. Let's only do the rating, bucket it by rating, and then by the number of total wins. Let's take a look at that, and then we'll try the colors. So this is really cool, this is the number of wins versus the popularity.

[00:03:36]
And then we can actually, and then so I think what I want to do is I think there was, so this is looking at the popularity of genre over the years, right?
>> Speaker 3: Over the months.
>> Shirley Wu: Over the months, this is over the months.
>> Speaker 3: Yeah, the idea is that you could potentially select a range of years to see per month, what other certain genres are popular at a certain month.

[00:04:10]
>> Shirley Wu: Yeah, I love it. So I think there was another one that was going to be sort of like a stacked bar chart. It was a similar thing but in popularity of different genres over the years, and you wanted to do a stacked bar chart where the x-axis is, the years?

[00:04:30]
>> Speaker 3: [INAUDIBLE] Underneath is that. So this is, each genre would get a color, and you would have the popularity as the axis on the left there. It's as simple as it sounds, it's a line chart with categories. But what we liked about it was if you're dealing with a large range the heat map becomes very difficult to discriminate.

[00:04:59]
So when your bins are getting to be very small and vertical width, I think a line does a much better job of representing the essential structure of what we're trying to show.
>> Shirley Wu: Okay, so let's do this. Let's first look at that question about wins versus popularity, and then let's go and try this as both a line chart, like either a stack bar chart or an area chart.

[00:05:27]
it's pretty easy to switch between them, so let's try that. And then at the end let's try the heat map and let's see what we learned from each of these. This is quite exciting. So let's start out with this question. So let me see if I can zoom in to just that part.

[00:05:51]
>> Shirley Wu: So let's try and figure out how to do this one together. So I have a digital version of a white board

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