The midterm elections in the US are next week. If you're able to vote, please do. Democracy is at stake. 

This week's data was about fundraising, spending and debt by people currently in Congress. If you missed #WatchMeViz, I showed 16 different ways to visualize this data set. Hopefully they give you a bit of inspiration for creating your own.

Catch up with the show below. In the end, I went with a bar chart that compares funds raised vs. spent by State. I also have a gantt bar to show the difference between the two. I have a tutorial of that chart here.

Below this video is an image of the dashboard I created. Click on it to see the interactive version on Tableau Public.

A circle timeline or bubble timeline is a way to display a series of dates on a timeline with a measure used to size the circles and, optionally, another measure to color the circles. 

I was discussing the makeovers of makeover I did last week and Megan Hunt told me that her mother calls Makeover Monday "Makeagain Monday", which got me thinking, maybe that should be the name for the series of posts I write where I makeover a Makeover Monday. So today, allow me to introduce you to Makeagain Monday.

The purpose isn't to pick on anyone. I use this as a teaching method. How can I take an existing visualisation and show I would improve and simplify it step-by-step. I only detail what I think doesn't work about the visualisation.

This week we looked at the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation and Pablo Gomez create this visualisation (click on it for the interactive version):


What doesn't work?

• Packed bubbles are basically impossible to compare
• What does the size and color of the bubbles mean? 
• Do the colors coordinate with the scatter plots? (The answer is no, but I didn't know that until I downloaded the workbook.)
• What do the scatterplots add? They all basically look the same.
• The massive image on the right takes up like 25% of the space. What does the flag mean?

This week’s Makeover Monday looks at the largest shipping container companies of 2016. The article includes this packed bubble chart:

What works well?

• It’s eye-catching and draws you in.
  
• The method for labelling ensures you only see the largest (as they names won’t fit otherwise).
• The color helps identify the largest companies.

What doesn’t work?

• Ranking is nearly impossible
  
• Are the depth of color and the size of the bubble for the same metric? The viz doesn’t tell us, so we’re left to guess.
• Is big good or bad?
• There’s no focus or context.

I started by changing it to a bar chart, but found that to be too boring, though effective. Then I saw an example by Shawn Levin which shows looks at the TEU per ship. That adds much more context to the visualisation. Shawn compared Total TEU to TEU per ship.

For me, I thought it was more meaningful to look at TEU per ship for both the total shipments and for the ships each company owns. This led me to the slope graph you see below which tells a much more meaningful story.

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For week 44, I tracked all of the things that distracted me. The data I collected included:

1. When did I get distracted?
   
2. What was I doing at the time?
   
3. What distracted me?
4. How long was I distracted?

When doing the analysis in Tableau, I started doing what I always do by building lots of different views. I started with how many, but there weren’t any days that were massive outliers. When looking at how long I was distracted, there was a big outlier on Wednesday. That was because we had Caroline Beavon teaching in amazing data visualisation class at the Data School and she introduced us to an infographics design tool called Piktochart. This is when I distracted myself. It was fun to play with and got me thinking more about design.

I built several more views looking at the different dimensions against the different measures. Nothing particularly exciting…until I built a bubble chart in which I colored the bubbles by whether or not social media was the distraction.

I generally have a disdain for bubble charts, but this particular view helped me easily see how often social media is a distraction. Does this mean I’m on my phone too much? Probably!

The view above simply looks at how often, meanwhile looking at the bubble chart by how long the distractions lasted makes social media distractions look not so awful.

Lastly, I needed to find a view that would allow me to incorporate all of the dimensions along with the length of each distraction into a single view. I came up with this viz:

Here are some of the design decisions I made:

• Show the day of the week left to right
  
• Inside each day, show the distractions in order from first to last going left to right
• To show what I was doing and what distracted me, I wanted to go with the idea of going from something to something else. I ended up with filled circles inside open circles. The open circle is what I was doing; the filled circle is what distracted me.
• Create groups of activities and distractions so that there aren’t too many colors

Lastly, I liked what Stefani did for her week 44 with the lines, so I tried to do something similar with my postcard version while maintaining the view I created in Tableau.