Click the Original, Code and Reconstruction tabs to read about the issues and how they were fixed.

Original


Source: Visual Capitalist Health Section (2020).


Objective

This visualisation is part of an article which highlights the fact that even though the health care facility is so advanced in this age, the health care and medical system is baised and most countries are not prepared for a pandemic. The visualisation aims to point out how the global health care system is unevenly distributed across the globe. It ranks countries based on Global Health Security Index. The visualisation is targeted towards the general public as the visualisation was published in visualcapitalist.com, a website which uses data-driven, powerful visuals to provide insights to millions of people around the world.

The visualisation chosen had the following three main issues:

  • Perceptual Issues: The visualisation fails to show how unevenly distributed the health care system is across the globe as it merely scales the countries based on Global Health Security Index. The visualisation aims to show that the African countries lack in health care facilities and have lower ranking than other regions but this is not at all evident from the original chart. Using Map can help in finding out how the health care security system is distributed across the wold.
  • Deceptive methods: The visualisation also uses a bigger circle for highly poplulated countries and smaller circle for low population countries, but this is very hard to understand. The population indicator shown in the background is very hard to grab the attention of the user. The observer might get tricked to just look into the circles which are big and skip the smaller circles. The visualisation only helps to identify the top performing countries and the most populous countries because they are easy to spot. Using a color code in the map can help in spot the regions with high health security index and regions of low health security index.
  • Improper Visualisation: The visualisation uses the country flag symbol to denote different countries which are scaled on the Global Health Security Index Score (y-axis). The problem with this is that people who are not familiar with the flag of different countries will find it hard to understand the full data. The reason being for certain countires only country flag is used and not the country name. The geographical location in the map would make it much more easier to locate the countries than using a flag to locate the countries.

Overall, the visualisation sways away from the key purpose of showing how unevenly distributed the global health care system is and how only developed countries around the world enjoy a high Global Health Security Score.

Reference

Code

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

library(ggplot2)
library(readxl)
library(dplyr)
require(maps)
require(viridis)
theme_set(
  theme_void()
)
GHI <- read_excel(
  "~/MC242/dv/assignment2template1950/data.xlsx")
world_map = map_data("world")
ghi_map <- left_join(world_map, GHI, by = "region")

p1 <- ggplot(ghi_map, aes(long, lat, group = group))+
  geom_polygon(aes(fill = Rank), color = "white")+
  scale_fill_viridis_c(option = "C")+
  ggtitle("Ranking Global Pandemic Preparedness based on Global Health Security Index Score")

Data Reference

  • Global Health Security Index (2019). Overall Preparedness. Retrieved April 30, 2020, from Global Health Security Index website: https://www.ghsindex.org/

Reconstruction

The following plot fixes the main issues in the original.