VizWiz

Launch, grow, and unlock your career in data

January 6, 2019

Makeover Monday: How Has Press Freedom Changed Around the World?

No comments
For week 2, Eva chose this visualization from Freedom House about the changing freedom of press in countries around the World.


What works well?

  • The colors contrast well and represent the values well (i.e., green = good, etc.).
  • The map zooms in nicely as you select a region across the top.
  • Good tooltips
  • The white borders around each country make them easy to distinguish.
  • Using dots to represent the small islands.

What could be improved?

  • Without using the zoom feature, small countries are very hard to see.
  • The title doesn't really tell me what the data map is about.
  • You can't see trends over time. In other words, you don't know if the press are getting more or less free.
  • There are no definitions for what the scores mean, unless you hover over a country.

What I did

  • I started by building a trellis chart that showed every country and its score over time. It was so messy and crowded so I scrapped it.
  • I wanted to see the overall trends, so I focused on the percentage of countries within each year that fall into each status.
  • I used the same color palette.
  • I wanted to show the change vs. 1993, so I included that as text on the end of each line.

I found this to be a particularly interesting, and a bit alarming data set. According to this data, the Press are becoming less free. That's not good for democracy.

No comments

Post a Comment