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

Original


Source: Putting Apple’s Value Into Perspective, From “How Big is Apple? This Visualization Puts Apple’s Market Cap Into Perspective” by Raul, HowMuch.net - a financial literacy website, 2019, (https://howmuch.net/articles/putting-apple-into-perspective)


Objective

The data visualization [1] throws light on the market capitalization of the Apple company in context with the value of other entities. The data was retrieved from multiple financial sources[2]. The targeted audience is the general public who are majorly inclined on understanding money or finance as stated by the article website.

The visualization chosen had the following three main issues:

  • Data Integrity Issue

    The data visualization was created to show how the market capitalization of the Apple company had reached an all-time high. This was done by making specious comparisons and by exaggerating the numbers. For example, it wouldn’t be right to compare the GDP of some countries with the market cap of Apple when in fact GDP is not a measure of wealth but instead a measure of output.

  • Deception Issue

    The visualization uses circles to represent the area/size of the quantitative value. This leads to inaccuracy as circles can not be compared and it gets difficult to get a good sense of their similarities or their differences. There are also unnecessary visual representations of the companies along with the text, which tends to distract the audience from the actual data in context.

  • Perception & Color Issue

    The visual effect of 3D circular disks stacked on top of each other in the chart introduces a depth distortion and also hides parts of the area of the circular disks. This leads to poor comparisons between the quantity values. There is also no color differentiation between Apple and the rest of the entities, so the perspective of Apple standing out is nullified.

Reference

[1] Raul. HowMuch.net - a financial literacy website. (2019). Putting Apple’s Value Into Perspective. https://howmuch.net/articles/putting-apple-into-perspective

[2] HowMuch.net - a financial literacy website. (2019). Putting Apple’s Value Into Perspective. https://howmuch.net/sources/putting-apple-into-perspective

Code

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

library(scales)
library(ggplot2)
library(readr)
library(dplyr)
library(rmarkdown)
library(magrittr)

#Reads the csv and puts the data into a created dataframe called companyData
companyData <- read_csv("CompanyData.csv")

#Removes unnecessary data from the original dataset
companyData <- companyData[!(companyData$`Company/Country` %in% c("Netherlands GDP", "Top 5 Billionares", "Top 300 Movies Income", "NASA Budget since 1998 (Inflation Adjusted)", "Narcos", "U.S. Dptm of Defence Budget (2019)", "Africa's 25")),]

#Rename the columns of the dataframe
colnames(companyData) <- c("Company", "Capital")

#Sort the values of the Companies in ascending order
companyData <- companyData[order(companyData$Company),]

#Creates a bar chart which highlights apple market cap to the rest of the entities
revisedChart <- ggplot(data = companyData, 
                       aes(x = Capital, 
                           y = Company,
                           fill = ifelse(Company == "Apple", "Highlighted", "Normal"))) + 
  scale_fill_manual(name = "area", values=c("#ba4d89","#f4a6d1")) +
  labs(title = "Market Capitalization of Apple in Comparison", x = "Capital in Billions", y = "Company in Market Cap.") +
  scale_x_continuous(labels = label_number(scale = 1/1e9, suffix = " B"), breaks = breaks_width(100000000000)) +
  geom_bar(stat = "identity") + 
  theme(legend.position = "none", axis.title = element_text(face = "bold", color = "black", size = 13) , plot.title = element_text(face = "bold", color = "black", size = 15), plot.margin = unit(c(1,1,1,1), "cm"))

Data Reference

Reconstruction

The following plot fixes the main issues in the original:

  • It now compares the Market capitalization of other companies or groups of companies with Apple, rather than comparing with other Income or GDP values.

  • The circular disks are converted to bars and aren’t used to represent area or size anymore. Unwanted images are removed.

  • Colors are kept to the minimum and the Apple bar is highlighted to grasp the audience immediately.