Demonstrating Editorial Focus and Learning About Your Data - Data Visualization: A Successful Design Process - page 70

You wouldn't and shouldn't publish an isolated, cluttered, and poorly-annotated
chart like this to convey a story to others, but when it is a visualization serving
yourself, it is a different matter. You created it and you know what you're looking
out for. Quick and dirty is absolutely fine.
The decision to place all countries onto one graphic is to enable visibility of the
interesting transitions, the crossovers, the seemingly cluttered parts, and the empty
parts. You could separate each country out into its own line chart and assess a matrix
of eight small-multiples. However, this would only show you the individual country
stories. Our keen interest here is in the relationship between the countries.
The chart shows how Germany's (blue) wide range of results, actually reflects their
general decline in medal winning levels and, by extension, their relative rank.
By contrast, China's wide distribution shows a country on the rise over the past
four games at least. The extended fascination of this trend would be whether they
will catch up and possibly overtake the US once we have the results and data for
the 2012 Games (not available at the time of writing this topic!).
Elsewhere, Russia can be seen to have moved up and down over the years and has
now been overtaken by China. There is an interesting chunk of white space for the
2008 results either side of the Russian value, leaving them quite comfortably in third
position. Interestingly, the UK has seemingly demonstrated a very similar pattern of
improvement relative to the Chinese over the past five events.
Sometimes no change is as interesting as some change and, in this respect, the
consistency of Republic of Korea is quite stark given the different generation of
competitors who will have contributed to those totals.
Otherwise there is nothing else really of significant interest. The charts have served
their purpose in discovering and confirming some relevant and interesting stories
concerning the contrasting experiences of China, Germany and, potentially, the
Republic of Korea.
Of course, sometimes you simply may not find a story. There just might not be
anything of substance to convey to others visually, in which case a table of data may
prove to be the most appropriate solution.
However, we have found our stories, so how do we tell them? As a bridge to the next
chapter, where we will be focusing on design matters around presenting our stories,
let's attempt a quick solution.