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

Original


Source: Fox News Network (2011).


Objective

The chart above was used by Fox News to show the trend line of the Unemployment rate of USA during the Presidency of Barack Obama in 2011. It was a wrap up of the entire year’s unemployment rate done on December 2011. The target audience of this particular graph is the entire population of USA.

The visualisation chosen had the following three main issues:

  • Manipulation of the graph: Taking the last three months into consideration only, we can see that there is a drop seen in the graph from 9.1% of September to 9.0% of October. But the next month’s value 8.6% is drawn around the same level as the 9.0%. Even though its explicitly mentioned as 8.6%, at the first look its hard to catch on. The graph has been altered to decieve the people by saying there’s no change in the unemployment rate.
  • Truncated axes: The Y-axis for the graph above has been truncated and the graph starts from 8%. This has exaggerated the trend line over the months where as it was supposed to show the relative change in time. The main purpose of the graph is to show how the unemployment rate has changed over the time frame, truncating the axis doesn’t help. Seeing as the graph is to show the unemployment rate, it would have worked better if they had taken the past few years into consideration to show the change more effectively.
  • Responsible use of colour: There’s no need for the background colour and the other colours because they are not serving any purpose. They don’t have any particular communication goal to perform and henceforth unneccassary.

Reference

Code

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

library(readr)
library(ggplot2)
library(magrittr)
Unemployment <- read_csv("~/Downloads/Unemployment rate.csv")
Unemployment$Month <-factor(Unemployment$Month, 
                       levels = c("Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", "May", "Jun",
                                  "Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct", "Nov"))
p <- ggplot(data = Unemployment, aes(x = Month, y = `Unemployment rate`))
pp <-p + geom_line(aes(group = 1),colour = "turquoise4") +
  labs(
    title = "Unemployment rate Under President Obama",
    x = "2011",
    y = "Unemployment rate(%)"
  )+
  geom_text(aes(label = `Unemployment rate`),size =3,position = position_dodge(width=0.2),hjust=1,vjust = 2)+
  geom_point(colour = "turquoise4") +
  ylim(0,10) +
  theme_minimal()

Data Reference U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2011. Unemployment Rate Falls To 8.6 Percent In November 2011. [online] Available at: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2011/ted_20111205_data.htm.

Reconstruction

The following plot fixes the main issues in the original.