this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
346 points (95.8% liked)
Data is Beautiful
1149 readers
4 users here now
Be respectful
founded 4 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What's the problem? The y-axis is sorted from A at the bottom to Z at the top.
Let’s say you were plotting some temperature data. You take the temperature every day and record it for a month. When you go to plot the data, the normal thing to do is decide on the scale for the y-axis and then plot each temperature point according to where it fits on that scale. This allows you to see any trends in your data (perhaps it’s spring and the temperature is trending upwards over the month).
What you don’t do is sort your temperature data and then put the lowest temperature at the very bottom and the highest temperature at the top, with every other point spaced evenly between those extremes according to their rank. This completely obscures the relative temperature differences between the points!
Well this is what was done with the number words data we’re discussing. Look at the plot for English. Notice that zero is in the top left (because z is last in sequence), followed by one halfway up, which is also okay. But then look at two and three. You would expect two and three to be very close together because they both start with t, but they’re not. Words starting with t should be around 76% of the way up the y-axis (because t is the 20th letter of the alphabet) but two is at 99% of the way up and three is 77% of the way up.
This is problematic if you’re hoping to use the plots to spot trends. For example, with German (as another commenter pointed out) all 2-digit number words read the ones place before the tens place. If the data were plotted by cardinality (treating each word as a rational number between 0 and 1) then you’d easily spot this trend in German number words because all the points would fall on roughly horizontal lines.
Is there a good way to do this? I am thinking one could (taking English as an example) treat each word as a base-26 number (o.ne, t.wo, t.hree, ...) and divide them by 26 to normalize values between 0 and 1.
Yes, that’s exactly the way to do it!
Oh now I finally see it. I thought all just gad their limits from A to Z, but they are all different. That's just... wrong
All data points, from all series are sorted on the Y-axis relative to one another, not the external constant of the alphabet. This is contrary to how graphs are most frequently plotted and means that the shape of the data can change significantly, based upon the size of the dataset. It's not that it's an invalid way of plotting, just unusual and, personally, I don't like it.