Many Eyes Visualization
The visualization I chose to critique from Many Eyes was titled Survival on the Titanic. I chose this visualization as it was one of the top rated and I am somewhat of a Titanic history buff.
The visualization is a bubble chart that shows the number of people, their sex, their age (adult/child) and their class who either survived or perished when the Titanic sank. .
Initial view is of non-survivors in first row and survivors in second then bubble for class with each bubble divided between sexes. Sex color coded blue for men and pink for women (very easy to remember!). You can scroll over either of the colors to get the actual number of men/women who make up total. This visualization was very simplistic in its design and that made it easy to read and understand the data.
Upon further review I discovered that there were expert options available for selection that allowed the viewer to see different perspectives of the data. For example, it could be viewed as a bar chart, the numbers of people could be displayed as totals or averages, and the size of the bubble could be based on percentage of row (this last was interesting to me because it showed me that there was a similarity in proportion of crew & third class passengers who perished. The numbers of 1st and 2nd class passengers who died were even more evenly proportioned).
Display options were also based on column data you were most interested in: sex, class, age, or total numbers. I was interested in the number of 1st & 2nd class children vs the 3rd class children who perished. The data showed that only 52 3rd class children died and no 1dt or 2nd children. I know this to be incorrect as there was one 1st class little girl who died as her mother refused to leave the ship until the whereabouts of the son could be determined (he had been saved by his nanny and was already on a lifeboat).
Only two negatives I would mention are: When I first saw the row headings of No and Yes I was confused, but then I figured out that No meant Didn’t Survive and Yes meant Survived; for the headers I would have liked to seen this more clearly defined. There was also no known data source available so the reliability of this data can be questioned.