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Bubble chart

Current rating 3.6/5 Impact: 4Accuracy: 37 votes
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Bubble chart
Presidential Vote Margin by County for Pennsylvania, 2008.
Visual types
Level of expertise
Source:
New York Times Visualization Lab (News)
http://vizlab.nytimes.com/visualizations/presidential-vote-margin-by-county-f
Interactive features
User can select variable, colouring, and categories to highlight.
Benefits & pitfalls to avoid
  • Using area or volume to represent data can distort data values, and exaggerate differences between values. For example, if the radius of the circle is used to represent data values, the area of the circle will quadruple if the data values double. There is also an issue of 'perceptual scaling' - the tendency of people to underestimate areas.
Create your own
  • Bubble charts can be created in a range of standard data applications such as Excel.