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

Original


Source: The Economist Intellignce Unit


Objective

Explain the objective of the original data visualisation and the targetted audience.

The visualisation chosen had the following three main issues:

  • Truncate axes makes the change looks significants
  • Plot width was been squeezed and the change even more drastic
  • No dot point and no number attach to it to display data in details, i.e. 5.51

Reference

Code

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

library(ggplot2)

demo_index <- data.frame(Year = c("2006", "2007*", "2008", "2009*", "2010", 
                                  "2011", "2012", "2013", "2014", "2015", 
                                  "2016", "2017", "2018", "2019", "2020"),
                      index =    c(5.51, 5.51, 5.55, 5.50, 5.46,
                                   5.49, 5.52, 5.53, 5.55, 5.55,
                                   5.51, 5.48, 5.48, 5.45, 5.38
                                   )
                      )

p1 <- ggplot(data = demo_index, aes(group = 1, x = Year,y = index))

p1 <- p1 + geom_line(stat = "identity", colour = "blue") + geom_point(colour = "red") + 
  geom_text(aes(label = paste(index,"",sep="")),nudge_y = -0.3, nudge_x = .05) +
  labs(
    title = "Global Democracy Index",
    subtitle="Global average of 167 countries, 10 = most democratic",
    
    y = "Index") + theme_minimal() + scale_y_continuous(limits = c(0,6))

Data Reference

Reconstruction

The following plot fixes the main issues in the original.

Note

*no data