“Torture the data, and it will confess to anything”*…
Add movement to a bar chart, and you’ve got yourself an audience-pleaser. These so-called “bar chart races” are not popular with data visualization experts– but what do experts know?…
I’m not a betting man. But I do enjoy a good bar chart race — a popular way to visually display and compare changing data over time. Bars lengthen and shorten as time ticks away; contenders accordingly hop over each other to switch places in the ranking. Will your favorite keep their lead? Look at that surprise challenger rush to the front! Meanwhile, furious battles are waged for the middle and even the lower spots on the list.
Bar chart races are a spectacular way to animate certain types of information, but the so-called dataviz community is skeptical. Many data visualization specialists complain that bar chart races are like a sugar rush: a lot of entertainment, but very little analysis. Big on grabbing attention, small on conveying causality. Instead of good seats at the data ballet, you get standing room only at the information dog track.
Well, all that may be true. But when is the last time you’ve been glued to a statistic about global coffee production? Bar chart races are fun to watch, not least because you can pick a favorite early on and get to see them win — or lose. In other words, you’re emotionally invested in the animation in a way that’s lacking from static stats.
Bar chart races are used for just about any dataset that can be quantified over time: best-selling game consoles, most trusted brands, highest grossing movies…
Any dataset that can be quantified over time can be turned into a contest that is both exciting and (a little bit) enlightening: from @VeryStrangeMaps, 10 examples of “Bar chart races: short on analysis, but fun to watch,” for example…
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As we ruminate on representation, we might check our watches: it was on this date in 1918 that the Standard Time Act (AKA, the Calder Act) became effective. Passed by Congress earlier in the year, it implemented across the U.S. both Standard time (the creation of time zones anchored in UTC, the successor to GMT) and Daylight Saving Time.
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