Original


Source :howmuch.net(2018)


Objective

Selected data visualisation focusses on comparing the amount that has costed to USA by natural disasters in last 40 years within 1980-2017. Out of 235 natural disasters, 52 has being selected that has impacted majorly to the USA economy in billions under different categories.

Target audience,

General public can be considered as one target audience as economic downturn directly affect them and public should be aware of the cost of disasters. Academics works in the fields of finance, environment specially Economists. Policy makers can be also considered as another group of audience.

The visualisation chosen had the following three main issues:

*Visual Bombardment - Visualisation is distracting audience from the main message given by data due to overwhelming colours and shapes used.

*Too much text in the visualisation - Focusing on the visualisation is hard since it has too many texts overlapping.

*Deceiving - Scales used in the visualisation (specially x axis) and dots which are used to represent a billion confuse and mislead the audience.

Reference

Code

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

#Load the packages 
library(readr)
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
library(ggthemes)

#Read the data in to R 
data <- read.csv("~/OneDrive/Cost of Climate dis - USA.csv", header = TRUE, sep = ",")

#Tidy and mainpulation of data

data$CPI_Cost <- round(digits = 2,(data$CPI_Cost/1000))

data$Name <- data$Name %>% 
factor(levels = data$Name[order(-data$CPI_Cost)]) 

# plotting the data 
correcction_plot <- ggplot(data,aes(y=Name,x=CPI_Cost)) +
  geom_point(aes(color=Type,size=2)) +
  geom_segment(aes(x=0,y=Name,xend=CPI_Cost,yend=Name))+
  facet_grid(rows = vars(Type), scales = "free_y", space = "free_y", switch = "y") +
  geom_text(aes(label=round(CPI_Cost,1),hjust=-0.5)) +
  scale_x_continuous(limits = c(0,180))+
  labs(title = "The Economic Cost from Weather and Climate Disasters to USA from 1980 to 2017",
       caption = " Source : National Centers for Environmental Information (NOAA)", 
       y="Weather and Climate Disasters ",
       x="Cost (Adjusted CPI in USD billions)") +
  theme_minimal()+
  theme(axis.title.x = element_text(size = 12, hjust = 0.5),
      axis.title.y=element_text(size = 12, hjust = 0.5),
      axis.text.y = element_text(size = 12),
      strip.text.y = element_text(size=10,colour = "darkblue",face="bold"),
      text = element_text(family = "Times"),
              legend.position = "none",
              plot.title = element_text(size = 16, hjust = 1),
              plot.subtitle = element_text(size = 10, color = "black"),
              plot.caption = element_text(size = 8,color = "black", hjust = 0))

Data Reference

Reconstruction

The following plot fixes the main issues in the original.