For these visualizations, I used the data of the most popular girl names in New Zealand and their frequencies over the decade. The line chart and the bar graphs are both ‘races’ that communicate the popularity of the girl names in any year compared to the other popular names in that year. I like the line chart because it gives the option to switch to rankings (instead of frequency/scores) to understand how popular the other names were relative to each other. The line chart is more useful if someone wants to track a particular name, as the visualization allows you to hover over an individual name and highlight it for its journey through the decades. You can also click on the names after the playthrough to highlight it and track that particular name over the decade. The bar chart paints a more clear picture of the rankings over the years and is an intuitively more understandable format.
If you leave a comment, I’d love to know which one you prefer!
I switched up the visualization settings to make it monotone instead of multicolored because there was a lot of visual confusion as the colored lines crisscrossed over each other. This was not a problem in the bar chart, because the bars are much thicker and not crossing over each other. For both visualizations, I changed the duration to make the race last longer so that the visual information was conveyed at a speed the audience could keep up. I don’t think it helped as much in the line chart as it did in the bar chart.
I had our reading in mind while I made choices about the data, and was wondering about what counted and didn’t even as I made decisions about popular baby names. The data we were working with is dated and obviously just for practice, but it raised reminders of the classification system reinforcing existing gender binaries in data collection and portrayal.
My visualization relates to DH because it can be used to form a historical timeline of certain types of data and track its rise and fall over the years. It reminds me of other DH techniques we learned using Google’s Ngram viewer for text analysis where we compared the usage of two or more words over time and looked for their relations. This visualization could be used to seek both qualitative answers, like the relationship between two data points, as well as quantitative answers like how the frequency of a data point changes with time.
3 thoughts on “Creating a Bar & Line Chart Race using Flourish”
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Wow! This is a really impressive post! I can tell you put a lot of effort into your visualizations, and I really love that you not only included two different visualizations, but that you also created them in a way that shows them actually progressing throughout the years! I personally like the second one more because it was easier for me to tell which names were at the top and most popular, and I could also easily see which names surpassed others at certain times. Great job!!
I think both visualizations do a great job of representing the data, but I think I prefer the second one. It does a great job of clearly showing the trends in baby names over time. It is really nice to be able to hover over specific names in the first visualization though.
The graphs that you created were very impressive! I liked how you created both a line chart and a bar graph that allowed you to present a lot more information. It was also really cool to see how you showed the visualization of the graph changing throughout the years, and I think the bar graph and line chart were excellent choices since it made it easier to see how names varied in statistics.