Morris Goes Against the Grain
In the third class of Metisâs D3 Course, Kai Chang tasked our class with analyzing the canonical dot plot data set, barley_data (full data_set). To get a better feel for the data, before diving into D3 development, Iâm going to throw it into Tableau and toy around.
To understand where I am coming from with this analysis I would recommend reading through Revolutions post about the Barley dot plot first.
Share any comment, question or feedback you have into the comment section at the bottom of this post.
Let start by looking at the yield at each site over time.
To me, what stands out here is Morrisâs consistency versus the other sites. Morris is the site thatâs third from the bottom and nearly flat. Now letâs look at it relative to all other sites and zoom into the years Revolution makes mention of in their post.
By giving all sites a shared y-axis we can better compare Morris to the others. While the original piece in Revolutions contains only two years we have nine in the set weâre analyzing. If we put our focus on only 1931 and 1932 we can see that all site take a steep dip except for Morris whose yield continues to rise, but only gradually.
To further drive home this point of comparison we can isolate the relevant years. In doing this, we get a good sense of Morrisâs yield compared to the other as well as the change in annual yield from 1931 to 1932. Morris is, in fact, the only site to have an increase from 1931 to 1932, but the growth was tiny. Itâs the change from year to year thatâs drastically different from Morris and others.
When we plot the YoY differences between Morris, it looks like every site took a hit is in 1932 yield. But it was only Morris that was able to continue to grow.
To see who is closest to Morris in Year over Year (YoY) change we can take a look at the slope graph presented earlier and call out the second most gradual slope between 1931 and 1932.
Okay, not we see you, Duluth.
To visualize that we color both Duluth and Morris in the YoY change area chart. By presenting the data this way, we can see the both Duluth and Morris had about the same YoY change between 1931 and 1932. It's just that Duluth's 1931 number weren't quite as good as Morris's.
To continue down this pattern of expanding and then focusing our scope, letâs look more closely at the YoY change between 1931 and 1932.
Here we see every site took a hit in 1932, and itâs not only Duluth that has a similar negative slope as Morris, but also GrandRapids. How about we make one last modification to compare percent change instead of yield amounts. Now we can better compare sites' relative change from an equal baseline.
If there were a race to be run in 1932 Morris wouldâve been considered the winner by a long shot. Bravo Morris!
To close, I want to create a view that shows us how sites yield compares to one another while intuitively communicating how the direction of change from 1931 to 1932.
With this view, we can see how Morris stacks up to the others regarding yield.
