VizWiz: USA

Showing posts with label USA. Show all posts

April 1, 2024

#WatchMeViz: Can viral infections be cured with antibiotics?

Americans , antibiotics , dot plot , dual axis , formatting , header , how to , KFF , Makeover Monday , stacked bar chart , survey , tableau , United States , USA , viral infections , WatchMeViz No comments

I'm really surprised, though maybe I shouldn't be, about the results from a poll of 1206 Americans by KFF. They asked a simple question:

"Can viral infections usually be cured by antibiotcs, or not? Or do you not know enough to say?"

According to the results, women know better than men, as do adults with higher incomes and higher levels of education.

I took on this data set for Watch Me Viz for Makeover Monday week 14. Check out my final viz here. There's an image below the video.

November 8, 2022

#MakeoverMonday Week 45 - Who Americans Spend Their Time With

age , America , American Time Use Survey , animation , formatting , interactivity , label , line chart , parameter , parameter action , reference line , tableau , time spent , trend , USA , viz in tooltip , WatchMeViz No comments

I found this week's data set super interesting, but also super sad in some ways, like people are more and more alone as they age. Or people spending less time with their partners when they are much older, clearly showing when people typically pass away.

I found the original visualization quite good, so during #WatchMeViz, I spend the hour replicating it. You can see during the video how much time formatting takes, and how I got annoyed about a new bug with colors. In the end, I go pretty close to the original, but some of the highlighting, and particularly the speed of the interactions couldn't be replicated in Tableau; Tableau simply isn't as responsive.

My viz is below the video or check it out here.

September 19, 2022

#MakeoverMonday Week 38 - American Business Applications

bar chart , business , comparison , dashboard , dashboard action , filter , heat map , hex map , line chart , Makeover Monday , parameter , start up , tableau , time series , trellis chart , trends , United States , USA No comments

Well, this was a pretty epic fail. No, it was a really big fail. Those that tuned in to Watch Me Viz will be well aware of my struggles with this data set. I don't know why. Maybe it was a concentration issue. I hope it was still useful to everyone, and I hope it was good to see someone with so much experience still struggle.

My original idea was to compare each State to the US average. I got the calculations right, but it was thoroughly uninteresting. Basically, the variance rarely changed. Therefore, there was nothing to see in the analysis.

I stopped the livestream after 90 minutes, the audience and I had suffered enough. Afterwards, I took a break and came back to Tableau. This time, I thought more clearly through the solution I was trying to create. Basically, I wanted something very much like the original, just a bit better looking.

It turns out I was overcomplicating the implementation and the calculations. Parameters were a much, much better solution and allowed me the flexibility I needed to create the month over month calculations.

I'd encourage you to check out the video. I tried lots of different things and explained what I was doing along the way, so you're sure to learn something. My final dashboard is below the video.

Have a great week everyone and thank you for being so supportive of Makeover Monday.

September 5, 2022

#MakeoverMonday 2022 Week 36 - Median Age at First Marriage in America

age , bar chart , color , connected scatterplot , hex map , level of detail , LOD , Makeover Monday , marriage , reference line , scatter plot , table calculation , tableau , tadpole chart , USA No comments

This was a relatively simple data set and I was able to build quite a few vizzes during Watch Me Viz. I ended up with something more complex that it needed to be, but it was fun figuring out how to create the calculations.

Here's how it works:

Compare the median age at first marriage of each state to the US average for 2006-2010
Compare the median age at first marriage of each state to the US average for 2015-2019
Check whether the State

Stayed above the US average in both time periods
Stayed below the US average in both time periods
Moved from below the US average to above the US average
Moved from above the US average to below the US average

Got it? Yes, it a bit confusing. In the end, we were able to highlight 6 states that moved above the US average to below the US average. All others stayed the same. What does this mean from an analytical perspective? Probably nothing, but it looks better than the original.

Check out the viz below the video or here.

July 26, 2021

#MakeoverMonday 2021 Week 30 - America's Racial Breakdown by State

bar chart , color , ethnicity , filter , highlight action , Makeover Monday , race , state , tile map , treemap , United States , USA No comments

Makeover Monday week 30 looked at this viz from Visual Capitalist showing the percentage of each race in each State in America.

In the video below, you'll see my recreate the tiled treemap before creating a tiled bar chart. Thanks for watching!

Click here to view the interactive version on Tableau Public.

July 6, 2021

#MakeoverMonday Week 27 - If Only _____ Voted

biden , bump chart , Democrat , demographics , election , heatmap , Makeover Monday , republican , stacked bar chart , Trump , United States , USA , vote , voting , WatchMeViz No comments

This week's data set was one of the most interesting we've had for Makeover Monday. I found it fascinating to see some of the extreme polarization in the demographics of US voters in the 2020 election.

Resources:

1. Data Set - https://data.world/makeovermonday/2021w27

2. Original Viz - https://bit.ly/3qQGsAo

3. How to Create a Trellis Chart - https://www.vizwiz.com/2021/02/trellis-chart.html

4. The Data Visualisation Catalogue - https://datavizcatalogue.com/

The original was really good and I didn't particularly want to create a map. Instead, I wanted to visualize all of the demographics at the same time to see if any patterns emerged. I find them a bit hard to see in what I created, but when I know what I'm looking for (e.g., women vs. men) then the contrasts really stand out.

I create the heatmap the way I did for two reasons:

To see across each metric in order to identify consistent blue or red patterns for an entire demographic (e.g., early voting or urban).
To see if individual States always voted for Biden or Trump irrespective of the demographic (e.g., CA, MA, MD for Biden or KS, KY, LA for Trump).

There are parts of Watch Me Viz you can skip, like early on when I build some maps and try to join the data together (unsuccessfully) or when I change the data to Excel format.

Thanks for tuning in! Interact with the viz by clicking on the image below or here.

June 14, 2021

#MakeoverMonday 2021 Week 24: Which States Have the Highest Average Student Loans?

average , BAN , big numbers , borders , color , containers , context , dashboard , debt , filters , hex map , Makeover Monday , student loan , United States , USA , WatchMeViz No comments

If you watch this week's #WatchMeViz (below), you'll get a good look at how I use containers to create a dashboard. I didn't iterate very much this week, as far as the number of charts is concerned, but I did mess around way too long when trying to create a hex inside of a hex map. HINT: It turned out terrible.

Resources:

Final workbook
U.S. Hexmap Shapefile (credit: Joshua Milligan)

May 17, 2021

#MakeoverMonday Week 20 - Humans vs Animals

animals , bar chart , barbell chart , charts , context , diverging bar chart , gender , graphs , human , Makeover Monday , men , radar graph , scatter plot , tableau , United States , USA , variance , WatchMeViz , women , YouGov No comments

Check out this week's #WatchMeViz as I look at what men and women think about fighting an animal unarmed. I iterated through 17 vizzes in 60 minutes that show how to compare two measures.

WatchMeViz

Visualization

April 26, 2021

#MakeoverMonday 2021 Week 17 - Price Parity in America

analysis , BAN , bump chart , calculated field , charts , comparison , context , dashboard , design , filter action , graphs , level of detail , Makeover Monday , price parity , rank , sort , USA , WatchMeViz No comments

In this week's Watch Me Viz, I covered the following charts:

Line chart
Trellis chart
Slope graph
Connected scatter plot
Bar charts with comparisons
Diverging bar charts
Heatmap
Hex map
Tile map
Barbell chart
Peas in a pod chart
Bump Chart
Comet chart

In the end, I settled on the bump chart using highlighting and BANs. Other topics covered include:

Sorting calculations
Level of detail expressions
Rank table calculations
Parameters
Filter actions
Padding in dashboards
Cleaning tooltips
Divider lines in dashboards

View the final dashboard here.

November 26, 2020

How to Create U.S. Electoral Cartograms

Alteryx , cartogram , Donald Trump , election , electoral college , Joe Biden , map , Noah Veltman , polygon , shape , United States , USA , workflow No comments

I don't remember how I came across the set of cartograms I'm going to show you how to create. Alas, I wanted to recreate this mesmerising set of cartograms that Noah Veltman created based on election maps from various media outlets.

Noah's page contains the vector files for each map. I saved them individually and prepped the data in Alteryx so that I could build the polygons in Tableau. Download the workflow here.

I needed to create two branches because some of the States are divided up into parts. For example, Maine in the NPR map has four blocks since Maine allocates each of its four electoral college votes separately. This required the same steps to be reproduced twice. For those States with multiple blocks, I had to split out each block, pivot them, then split those results, and pivot one more time.

Once I had the CSV, it was pretty easy to build in Tableau.

X on the Columns
Y on the Rows (and reverse the axis)
Set both X and Y to AVG
Change the mark type to Polygon
Add the Path field to the Path shelf (this tells table how to connect the edges of the polygon)
Add the State field to the Detail shelf

From there, it was some formatting for the colors, etc. This process, I would think, would work for any SVG (vector) file. This was a fun little project. I learned a lot!

November 19, 2020

Pregnancy, Birth, and Abortion Rates in America

abortion , age , America , amy coney barrett , birth , civil rights , comparison , conservative , justice , law , liberal , pregnancy , rate , roe v. wade , supreme court , tile map , trend , United States , USA , women No comments

With Amy Coney Barrett being sped through the confirmation process of the US Senate before the 2020 Election (as hypocritical as it was) to become the 9th justice on the Supreme Court, there is now a conservative stranglehold on the judicial branch of government.

Justice Barrett deflected all questions about her stance on abortion during the confirmation process and it has raised lots of speculation that Roe v. Wade will be overturned. Yeah, you know, because the government should control a woman's body, yet there is nothing similar for men. Like, why doesn't a man get castrated if he accidentally impregnates a woman? Blasphemy they say; hypocritical I say.

I wonder if any of the anti-abortion Justice or Congresspeople have ever considered their stance if their daughter had an unplanned pregnancy. What is she got raped and pregnant? I bet their tune would change.

Anyway, my political and social views aside, this made me think about abortion rates in America. Since Roe v. Wade, abortion rates in the US have plummeted.

What the data tells us is that Roe v. Wade has actually led to a REDUCTION in abortions. It also shows us the shift towards women waiting later in their lives to have children.

All of the data comes from the Guttmacher Institute (I'd highly recommend you read their insights), which I have compiled and prepared. You can download the data here.

The view I wished that the Guttmacher Institute had was a way to view regional trends, State trends and comparisons to U.S. and All Ages data. I decided to create a tile map showing the trends over time, which also allows you to include or exclude the US and All Ages totals. It's an interesting data set to explore. Start with your own age and where you live. What's the situation there?

This was a fun visualization to build and I would like to thank Seffana Mohamed-Ajaz for her feedback and suggestions of some minor tweaks.

Click on the gif below to interact with the visualization. There's an important story to tell and important rights of women to ensure are retained.

October 29, 2020

How to Create Time Series Tile Grid Maps

area chart , bar chart , dual axis , hex map , line chart , map , small multiples , squares , tile grid map , tile map , trends , unemployment , United States , USA No comments

Unlike traditional maps, tile grid maps allow you to allocate equal space to each geographical area. We've probably all seen hex maps of the United States. Tile Grid Maps are similar, except they are squares with each block being the same shape and size.

In this video, I show you first how to create the tile grid map, then how to overlay time series data. I then show you three different visualization types for the time series. You could easily create bar charts as well.

Enjoy!

February 26, 2020

Visualizing the Geography of TV Stations

contour , Erin Davis , FCC , frequency , geography , map , parameter , region , signal , TV , United States , USA No comments

It seems to have been a while since I worked on a personal data analysis/visualization project. The one I'm going to take you through below was inspired by a piece of work I saw by Erin Davis (no contact info to link to). Check out her amazing portfolio on her website.

The piece I wanted to replicate in Tableau is based on her beautiful work Visualizing the Geography of FM Radio. Since she had already done this for radio, I thought I'd try to replicate her work, but with TV stations, that is, the strength and coverage that the broadcast signals from TV stations transmit.

First, I had to prep the data. Fortunately the raw data was easily accessible on the FCC website as are explanations of the fields and how to use them. The FCC also have information about which States fall into which FCC regions. I manually grouped the States into their regions in Tableau (it would have needed to be manually created data anyway).

From there, it was some data prep to get the signal boundaries for each state, ensure they are in the correct State (e.g., some stations that were listed in California actually plotted in other States), then export as a TDE (Hyper files don't work well with polygons).

Here's the Alteryx workflow:

For Tableau, I created a custom color palette based on the color legend on Erin's vizzes, replicated her maps as close as possible, and that's it!

Enjoy!

December 1, 2019

#MakeoverMonday: How have annual wages changed for union vs. non-union employees?

BLS , comparison , KPI , labor , level of detail , LOD , LOD calc , Makeover Monday , money , non-union , salary , statistics , union , United States , USA , wages , year over year No comments

Four weeks to go with Makeover Monday 2019. We've had lots of interesting vizzes to makeover and lots of interesting data. This week, I wanted to pick a simple visualization and simple data.

What works well?

I like the handwriting font. It makes the viz look fun.
The colors are distinct enough.
Using shading on the title as a legend

What could be improved?

Some hands are holding another, some are not. What does that mean? Does two hands mean union? If so, I don't understand why they join where they do.
Using weekly wages is a tough concept to grasp. Why not convert it to annual wages?
The viz is clearly not designed for any sort of precision or comparison.

What I did

I really liked this Viz of the Day recently by Spencer Bauke and thought this was a good data set to try to emulate his work.
I wanted to use parameter actions to allow the user to change the comparison year.
I also wanted to use set actions like Spencer did, but this data wasn't structured in a way that made sense to try to do that.
This turned out to be very good practice for LOD expressions.
I loved using containers to lay all of this out!! It's a lot of work, but much easier to get everything to line up and all be the same size.

Here's my Makeover Monday week 49. Click on the image for the interactive version.

July 29, 2019

#MakeoverMonday: STD Infection Rates in America 1996-2014

America , CDC , infection , Makeover Monday , sexually transmitted disease , std , tableau 6 , United States , USA No comments

For week 31, I asked the community to makeover one of my very first Tableau Public dashboards. Tableau Public went live with version 6.0 in November 2010.

Here's the viz:

Eva had the idea this week to created a discussion on Twitter about what people thought could be improved. For me, it's been a fascinating discussion and it shows how much people participating in Makeover Monday have learned about data visualization. Follow the thread here.

WHAT WORKS WELL?

Simple title that includes the time frame for context
Using the subtitle as instruction
Keep the filters grouped together on the right, out of the way

WHAT COULD BE IMPROVED?

Lose the red/green color palette.
A diverging color palette should only be used if there's a natural midpoint; there isn't one with this data
There's double encoding on every chart.
The State filter list it too big; granted though that there was no multi-select dropdown filter at the time.
The map and the states bar chart are the same.
The sparklines and the bar charts represent the same data.
The reference lines aren't needed. What does an average infection rate really mean?

WHAT I DID

I decided to go back to Tableau 6 to see if I could create something decent. You can see the whole recording below. I took a lot of the feedback from Eva's thread and incorporated it into my viz. A few decision I made:

Simplified the metrics
Used a map that weights all states equally (like a hex map but circles)
Used only a single color
Used highlighting more effectively
Created simple filter actions
Used simple chart choices

So here's my Makeover Monday, built with Tableau 6.0:

July 14, 2019

#MakeoverMonday: More than ever, Americans aren't having sex

frequency , Makeover Monday , sex , United States , USA No comments

Week 29 has us analyzing the changing frequency of sex by Americans. Thank you to Pablo Gomez for bringing this chart to my attention.

What works well?

Overall, the chart is really good.
The title and subtitle make it very clear what the viz is about.
The labels focus you to the topic the creator wants you to focus on.
I like how the first year is a filled dot and the last year is an open dot.
Bolding the first and last years on the axis
Including the % sign on the y-axis for only the top value

What could be improved?

Is this colorblind friendly? I'd recommend verifying.
Does green mean good?
I don't know how they came up with the percentages they did. They don't match the source.
Label the lines directly with their frequency instead of using a color legend.
Lighten the gridlines.

What I did

Like the original, I filtered out 2012 because the data looks corrupted.
I liked the original, so I didn't change a whole lot. The main difference was splitting up the frequencies vertically.
Because I split of the frequencies, I made the viz tall and skinny and mobile friendly.
I labeled the start and end of each line.
I labeled the highest value for each frequency.
I included the change between 1989-2018 on the end of each line as a summary. I had to float everything to make this work, which damaged my soul a bit.
I'm only displaying the first and last year on the y-axis.
I included tooltips so the reader can see the exact values.
I used three shades of a single color that go from least sex to most sex (since the focus is on less sex).
I kept the same title and subtitle.
I used fonts from the Washington Post website. NOTE: They won't render on Tableau Public unless you have the same fonts installed (Playfair Display and Yantramanav).

February 11, 2019

Makeover Monday: How President Trump Spends His Executive Time

Donald Trump , Makeover Monday , President , stacked bar chart , United States , USA No comments

Axios published a fascinating article and data set last week with details of President Trump's hourly schedule. To say "Executive Time" is a major part of his day would be a gross understatement. The article doesn't give any specifics about how that time is actually spent, however it does provide some interesting insight:

Trump usually spends the first 5 hours of the day in Executive Time.
He spends his mornings in the residence, watching TV, reading the papers, and responding to what he sees and reads by phoning aides, members of Congress, friends, administration officials and informal advisers.
Trump doesn't take an intelligence briefing until 11am or 11:30am, and they only last 30 minutes.

The list, sadly, goes on. The viz they posted that we're making over this week is this simple stacked bar chart.