Original


Source: Shen et al. (2018).


Objective

  • The Main objective of this visualization is to show the relative coverage of articles in the New York Times (NYT), mentioning the top 10 causes of death in the USA in addition to terrorism, homicide and drug overdoses which received significant media attention.

  • The target audience here is the general public of the United States and in particular the readers of the New York TImes (NYT).

The visualisation chosen had the following three main issues:

  • Using Area: The visualization uses area to represent the share of causes of deaths. This creates a visual deception for the reader. For example: kidney disease seems like a straight line in the visual indicating that it has neither decreased nor increased since the year 1999. However it is not the actual case.
  • Colour Bombardment: There is sloppy use of color and there are far too many colors, with no apparent reason. The color blind test at https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/ shows that this visualization is very unfriendly to Red,Green and Blue - Blind people.
  • Difficult to make comparision: The visualization is difficult to read and follow. Comparision among different years and causes of deaths is not easy. For example for kidney disease the comparision of data for different years seems difficult, since there curve itself is not clear. Similarly, it is difficult to compare between kidney disease and drug overdose for any particular year.

Reference

Code

The following code was used to fix the issues identified in the original.

setwd("C:/Users/Hafsa/OneDrive/Documents/Data Visualization/as2")
df <- read_csv("death-coverage-in-nyt.csv")
names(df)[4] <- "Share_NYT_Percentage"

plt <- ggplot(data = df, aes(x=Year,y=Share_NYT_Percentage,fill=Year))+
  geom_bar(stat="identity") + facet_wrap(~Entity, scales ="free")  + theme(legend.position = "none",plot.title = element_text(family = "Palatino", face = "italic", size = (15),colour="steelblue4"),axis.title = element_text(family = "Palatino", size = (10), colour = "steelblue4"))

plt <- plt + ggtitle("Relative Coverage of causes of death in the New York Times(NYT)\n1999 to 2016") + labs(y="Share of NYT media coverage(%)", x = "Year")

Data Reference

Reconstruction

The following plot fixes the main issues in the original.

The reconstruction of the original plot shows percentage of each cause of death year wise.