Hello, I’m Adam a student at Swansea University. As part of the module we were asked to create data visualizations for the global power plant database: http://datasets.wri.org/dataset/globalpowerplantdatabase
I have come on here to ask how could my visual design be improved.
Image :
Visual Design Type : Scatter Plot
Name of Tool : Tableau
Countries : The 30 largest countries by gigawatt hours (GwH) produced in 2014.
Year : 2014
Visual Mappings :
X axis: amount of energy (GwH) produced by the country (logarithmically scaled).
Image: Each point has an image of the country flag.
Size: The total capacity of all recorded power plants in the country.
Unique Observation :
We can see that, maybe not suprisingly, China and the U.S. come out on top for energy generation. Both countries significantly outpace any other in terms of energy generation. Germany is the biggest European producer of energy.
Data Preparation : The GPPD includes both estimated data for 2014 as well as recorded data. So that I can access as much data as possible provided by the dataset I grouped these together (after some sanity checks) into one field.
Questions : I chose not to use a linear scale as China and the U.S. are such big outliers that they make it difficult to compare the rest of the countries. Is this an appropriate solution to that problem?
Does the data read clearly?
Do you think that including flags in the visualization will help or hinder understanding?
I also generated similar insight with a map visualization but found it hard to easily contrast between countries? Are there any better visualization techniques I could have used? Do you think this technique provides additional insight over a map based visualization?
