Matthewebmckenna.com Website Review

learning. I'm hoping to break into the field of Data Science and will use this website to docu*ent my learning journey. A few weeks ago I finished the second course in the University of Michigan's Data Science with Python Specialisation - Applied Plotting, This course was concerned with creating good Data Science visualisations. A point which was reiterated throughout this course was that it is easy to create misleading data visualisations, intentionally or not. In the first week we were told about Alberto Cairo's qualities of great data visualisations. According to Cairo, a great visualisation Our Week 1 as*ignment was to find a misleading visualisation and identify how it misleads the decoder, or viewer of the There is no shortage of misleading graphics available online. Indeed, there are entire websites devoted to displaying these (a sort of section on bad data visualisations that is worth having a quick look at. I decided to choose a graphic that I had come across a few years ago. It was tweeted by an Irish politician in November 2014. The chart There are several misleading elements contained in this graphic: This graphic hides relevant data by not labelling the axes. The line shown could potentially represent anything. The decoder of the visualisation must take it on faith that the title accurately describes the data. The graphic also misleads by distorting the data - the Y-axis starts at 10.9%. I think you'll agree that this visualisation would be hard-pressed to meet Cairo's principles above! Some might defend the chart, stating that because the title mentions unemployment rate reduction over a five year period, that you can However, by starting the scale at 10.9%, the decoders of this graphic are mislead into seeing a much greater drop in unemployment rate. The only labelled data point on the graphic is hidden due to the poor choice in colour schemes, further obscuring the truth. To someone who may only give this graphic a quick glance, there is no easily visible reference point for the drop in unemployment rate. The line shown