About Makeover Monday
MakeoverMonday is a social data project which “offers inspiration and a dose of perspective for those who communicate data, and allow people to explore different perspectives and approaches to create more effective visualizations.”
To be more specific, “Each week we post a link to a chart, and its data, and then you rework the chart. Maybe you retell the story more effectively, or find a new story in the data. We’re curious to see the different approaches you all take. Whether it’s a simple bar chart or an elaborate infographic, we encourage everyone of all skills to partake. Together we can have broader conversations about and with data.”
Inspired by Dong Yu (an amazing data analyst also graduated from USC), I started this project from January 2019 and hope to better understand how to interpret data and translate insights into impactful visualizations.
All my Tableau visualizations can be found here through my Teableau Public profile.
Makeover Monday Week 2
The MM this week is about the level of press freedom in the world. The original visualization and dataset is here in case you are interested, and the source is from Freedom House.
It is definitely an interesting topic to me, since in China, people are always debating about the “appropriate” level of freedom that should be given to the press.
The original visualization focused primarily on depicting the static press freedom status around the world. However, as a reader, I am more interested in knowing how have the level of freedom change been changing over the years.
Therefore, I segmented the countries by their status changes throughout the years. The possible status include: Not Free (NF), Partially Free (PF) and Free (F). Then I visualized it using a map and a bar chart in Tableau and used different scale of colors to reveal the insights.
The interactive graph is attached below. You can click at the bottom right corner to zoom in the visual and view in full screen. Also, feel free to click on the bars or hover your mouse on the map to extract more information.
Then, I realized that analyzing the change of scores may help my gain a more dynamic understanding of the overall trend, so I shifted my direction towards the freedom status, and calculated the percentage of change by comparing the oldest freedom score, which is mostly from 10 years ago, to the latest freedom score, which are mostly around 2016 and 2017, to check which countries have been making progress in improving their press freedom, and which countries were performing worse in this aspect. Then, I arbitrarily made the following segmentation on the percent of changes to help my audience better capture the big picture with a bar chart.
| % of Changes | Segment |
|---|---|
| >50% | Greatly Declined |
| >0 & <= 50% | Mildly Declined |
| <-50% | Greatly Improved |
| >= -50% & <0 | Mildly Improved |
- Please note that the lower the score, the higher the level of press freedom.
I have also pasted my visualization below. Make sure to zoom in to fullscreen for a more accurate display.
Insights
- Overall, most of the countries’ freedom status remain unchanged, since only a few countries have significant changes in score (Greatly Declined ones and Greatly Improved).
- Most of the countries remain unchanged in their press freedom level.
- Countries that are declining in their press freedom are more than countries that are improving their press freedom.
- Africa, Europe and South Asia are the regions that improved the most, while North and South America and Australia were among the fastest declining regions.