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

Original


Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Australia#/media/File:Fastest_Growing_Religions_in_Australia_2016.png


Objective

The apparent objective of the visualisation is to show the fastest growing minority religion in each state.

I say “apparent” because the objective is confusing as it the visualisation title speaks of a singular religion while the legend lists multiple, although this is just as a comparison.

The aim is to show that minority religions are growing rapidly, presumably at the expense of the major relgions.

Audience

The audience is adherents of these minority religions to show them how quickly their faith is growing in each state. This would help those religions plan and disperse their resources better to capture their growing membership across Australia.

The audience that will be most interested is Hindus as the map only shows how fast that faith is growing.

Issues

The visualisation chosen had the following three main issues:

Issue 1: Use of Colour

  • Most of the map is coloured a strong pink, except for South Australia which is half strong pink and half strong aqua.

  • Looking at the legend the closest match for the strong pink is Buddhism leading the reader to think Buddhism is the fastest growing religion in all states, except South Australia. Looking to understand the aqua of South Australia, the closest match is Islam although this is quite a light aqua colour.

  • The legend only has one shade of aqua, so the reader can conclude that the strong aqua on the map does indeed refer to Islam, despite the obvious difference in the tone of the two uses of aqua.

  • Extending this line of thinking, the reader is lead to question whether the strong pink of the map is indeed matched to the strong pink of Buddhism in the legend?

  • Reading the percentage figures in the legend, we can see that Hinduism, which is also represented by a pink colour, although a much softer tone, is growing at 59.8%. This is much faster than Buddhism which is only growing at 6.6%. So the pink shading on the map must be referring to Hinduism, not Buddhism.

  • This is corroborated by the annotation on South Australia indicating Hinduism shares the fastest growth rate in that state alongside Islam (which is also backed up by the small key to the map in the bottom left corner).

  • It is clear that the saturation of the pink colour varies between the map and the legend label for Buddhism and Hinduism, making it difficult to determine which minority religion is the fastest growing in Australia.

Issue 2: Misleading Data Selection

  • The visualisation is titled “Fastest Growing Minority Religion in Each State…” but religion is not identified on the map except in South Australia.

  • After some colour matching confusion (explained above) we can determine that the visualisation is trying to show us that the fastest growing religion is Hinduism at 59.8%. However the very next legend item is Sikhism which grew at 74.1%!

  • This confusion leads the reader to question the very essence of the graph which seems intent on highlighting the growth of Hinduism as the fastest growing religion across all of Australia, except South Australia.

Issue 3: Confusing Annotation

  • The title is very long title and includes the data reference (census year) and scope (ACT/NT reference) and what looks like a sub-title covering the growth of other selected categories.

  • The title and sub-title are grouped together with a battle-axe grey background to separate them from the map.

  • The sub-title could be confused as the legend to the map although none of the data matches.

  • The true legend is carved out of the title / sub-title box with a white background matching the main map background, although it is buried beneath the title box making it look like an after-thought.

  • Even worse, the sub-title and proper legend are next to each other and both list distinct religions or categories of religion, as well as abolute numbers and percentage changes, drawing the reader to treat these two components as equals as the compare the data.

  • Adding further confusion are the two footnotes at the bottom left of the main map.

  • The first footnote clarifies the legend at the very bottom right of the visualisation, while the second clarifies the use of two colours for South Australia.

  • The first footnote is redundant as it simply repeats information stated in the visualisation title, which should have been a sub-title.

  • And while the second footnote does explain why there are two religions shown for South Australia, it does not explain why the fact that Hindusim and Islam both have an absolute growth rate within 3% is relevant, or why this was used to include them both.

Reference

Code

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

library(ggplot2)
library(magrittr)
# install.packages("rlang")
library(rlang)
library(readxl)
Religion_Sum <- read_excel("~/200 - RMIT/40 - Data Visualisation - MATH 2404/Assignment 2/Religion_Sum.xlsx")
View(Religion_Sum)
Religion_Sum$State <- Religion_Sum$State %>% 
  factor(levels = Religion_Sum$State[order(-Religion_Sum$Tally)])
p1 <- ggplot(Religion_Sum, aes(State, Tally)) 
p1 <- p1 + geom_bar(stat = "identity", fill = "dodgerblue3") + 
  labs(title = "Increase in Hindu Adherents by State, 2011-2016")  + labs(y = "Total New Adherents") +
  geom_text(aes(label = Tally), vjust = 0.1)

Data Reference

Reconstruction

The following plot fixes the main issues in the original.

These values are taken from the original visualisation. I have validated their accuracy by retrieving the original data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This can be found at:

Data Source – 2016 2071.0 - Census of Population and Housing: Reflecting Australia - Stories from the Census, 2016
LATEST ISSUE Released at 11:30 AM (CANBERRA TIME) 27/03/2018
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/2071.02016?OpenDocument Downloads –> Data Cubes –> Religion – Excel Released 20/07/2017