Finding the right tool for the job

Right_Tools_For_The_JobMGarrod - Matt Garrod.png

CREATED BY: Matthew Garrod

DESCRIPTION:

This chart explores how members of the data visualization community use different tools and chart types for different purposes. It focuses on user’s responses to the questions:

1) What technologies do you use to visualize data?
2) Which of these charts have you used in production in the last 6 months?
3) What does your audience use your data visualization for?

The data was filtered down to the most commonly occurring technologies and chart types in order to make the results more interpretable.

The left hand side consists of four bar charts which show the top 5 technologies used by those whose answer to the question 3) contained research, education, journalism or entertainment.

The right hand side contains a heatmap which illustrates the most commonly occurring pairs of technologies and chart types from the user’s answer to the questions 1) and 2) respectively. The co-occurrence of charts and technologies was defined by the number of times specific chart types and technologies were found to co-occur divided by the total possible times that they could have co-occurred.

Starting from the LHS of the chart the audience can choose a particular chart type (e.g Raster Map) moving right allows them to identify the two technologies that were most likely to co-occur with that chart type (for Raster map this is ArcGIS and QGIS).

Each user could use multiple answers to questions 1) and 2). As a result, the correspondence between technologies used and chart types won’t be exact. For example, I can't imagine a particular reason why ArcGIS should co-occur with Infographics. However, many of the pairings seem intuitive. Gephi (a software platform for graph/network visualization) tends to co-occur with both force-directed graph and network diagram - which is what one should expect!

PROCESS:

Explanation will be posted at: https://github.com/MGarrod1/DVSSC_19 (time permitting!).