Demonstrating Editorial Focus and Learning About Your Data - Data Visualization: A Successful Design Process - page 69

Does this alter the focus of our questioning or change our impressions of the
main insights?
If anything it reinforces them, especially our interest in the varied performance levels
for Germany and China. It also emphasizes the remarkable consistency of Republic
of Korea and France.
At this point, we have definitely established a scent for the story. We have started
to articulate the data questions that best interrogate this data and most likely reflect
what the readers of a visualization about this subject will wish to learn.
We now need a different visual representation. Using the floating bar we have
seen the categorical view of the countries and their performances. Now, we need
to switch our perspective to the other main variable, that of event year, to pursue
our curiosities about the transition of medal-winning performances and the
transition in ranking of the individual countries across the five Olympic Games.
For this next visual sketch we turn to a line chart. On this single chart we plot the
eight countries, differentiated by color, showing the absolute medal wins from left
to right across the five Olympic events:
It looks a bit messy doesn't it? Don't worry. Remember, this is an exploratory
visualization for ourselves. We are the audience and we just want to see if we
can discover some interesting physical properties about the data in this display.