Views of Parties' Ideologies

US Politics has always intrigued me. Firstly because it is the oldest democracy in the world, and is one of the strongest. Secondly due to its bipartisanship. As someone in India, where new political parties are formed on a daily basis, without any rhyme or reason; it never ceased to amaze me, how the system, and more importantly, the two parties have been able to adapt, transform and evolve over time to appeal to the populace and cater to their needs and aspirations.

The dataset is taken from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press article captioned, "More Now See GOP as Very Conservative". I chose to present the snapshot based on the results of the survey conducted between Aug 17-21, 2011.

I chose to keep it simple, 3 charts for 3 tables, and space for Information synopsis for those seeking to read more into the numbers.

Once finished, I had a wicked idea in mind. What if I were to bind my three separate charts into one? It looks good but doesn't improve on anything, other than saving some space.

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Florence Nightingale Circumplex Chart

I was taken to the Florence Nightingale's Wiki page during a recent research, and one of the interesting things I noted was her contribution to statistics. It came to me as a pleasant surprise that she is credited with inventing the polar area diagram , or occasionally the Nightingale rose diagram, which is equivalent to a modern circular histogram. Following the completion of my project and in my weekend to spare, I devoted time to recreating the chart in Excel. It took a combination of Doughnut-Pie-and XY charts and close to four hours to finish it. The colours are a bit darker, the values are approximate and the labels differently oriented, yet the chart looks fairly close to the original as is shown by the picture below.

The Playfair Charts: Scotland ExIm Barchart

Soon after finishing the second Playfair chart, the one on Wheat Price and Wages, I searched the internet for additional charts made by him. I found a Bar chart circa 1786, which showed the Scottish export and import volumes with other countries. For me, the real thrill was to scroll by the list of the name of places long consigned to history books - Jersey Is, Greenland, Prussia, Denmark and Norway (together) and Flanders. First, the original Playfair Barchart from Wikipedia, Then, my version of it in Excel. A couple of parting words: Excel 2007 no longer support dots and lines as fillers for charts. Hence, the ribbed import chart is given a different color, Gold. Normally, I'd use data point labels to construct the chart legends and other declarations given at the bottom of the chart. However, given Excel 2007' inability to automatically re-size labels to fit texts, I was forced to use text-boxes instead.

The Cricket Graphs: The Forgotten Chart

The fun of receiving feedback to blog posts is that one isn't quite sure what they might come up against. While mostly it provides fascinating discussions, insightful comments or explanatory questions, there is also the odd occasion when it throws up unusual requests. The other day I received an email in response to my post, The Cricket Graphs . The sender wanted me to create a "Partnership" chart, which would show the runs scored by the pair of batsmen for every wicket and the balls faced. I went searching for data on the Cricinfo website , and picked out the 3rd ODI between the South African and Australian cricket teams which was played out in Kingsmead, Durban on October 28, 2011. The Partnership details were taken from the page titled Partnerships Table and the total balls faced by individual batsmen from the Scorecard. Constructing the graphs was a somewhat tricky affair, with two potential bar charts in two axes representing Balls and Runs, which had me w...

Somnath's Excel Charts

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