This is the first workbook I've published to Tableau Public. You can click just about anywhere and the visualization will update.

It's pretty obvious that nearly all of the activity is on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. At least that has been reported relatively accurately.

My favorite bubble man uploaded another doozy. This time he's displaying troop deployments to Afghanistan.



The first message that the bubbles are trying to communicate is simply the number of troops deployed.

I can see why he has the bubbles across the top; they're in a neat ascending order, but then the US is show below all of the other countries? Why aren't they all arranged together?

Also, what is the purpose of having all of the other types of "troops" on the chart? Finally, there is one pretty big issue with the data; where are all of the other countries that have sent troops?

Bubbles are a poor method of showing relative size. A simple bar chart works much better. Unlike the author, I have included "all other" countries.



The second message, which I cannot make heads or tails of, is the number of troops per million of the population. What is the purpose of this data and what insight can you possibly gain from it?

When I first saw this chart, I immediately tried to connect the bubbles at the top to the bubbles at the bottom, but it's impossible.

The title of the second chart is "Which countries have sent the most troops?" Ok, one more time, how could anyone possibly answer that question based on the troops per million of the population?

When I saw the question, I immediately though of a bar chart showing the percent of the total troops that each country has sent. I created this visualization below and added color to emphasize those countries that have more skin in the game.

From my visualization, you can see that the US has sent about 47% of the troops. In the bubble chart, I see the number 98. Which one do you think answers the question more appropriately?



If you really want to get sick, check out the rest of the author's bubble charts on this topic. I don't get the fascination with the bubbles...

* Data courtesy of The Guardian DataBlog

Flowing Data had a post today listing resources to find data. One of these sources was the Guardian Datablog.

The image below caught my eye. It's from a Flickr pool for the Guardian datablog.



The author's says "Latest military casualty figures in proportion to each force's troop numbers. I think this gives a clearer sense of which armies are taking the most flak."

Ok, I get the intent, but why the bubbles? Doesn't a simple bar chart provide a much simpler method for communicating the data?



Here's what I see in the data: the US provides the bulk of the forces, but loses the fewest casualties as a percentage of the total force. It's known across the world that the US military is one of the most prepared, so this shouldn't surprise anyone. I don't see any enlightening information in the author's analysis, other than simply giving us a pretty report.