September 13, 2018
Taylor Sokolowski
Metrics & Data Visualization I
Assignment 1.2 Visualization Critique, link to assignment in syllabus
For my visualization critique, I chose Landscapes of Religions, designed by accurat. I came across this visualization as I was exploring different visualizations for my mood board and chose it for the critique for a couple of reasons. First, because I'm really interested in the topic of religion and especially inter-faith dialogue and exchange, so I loved how this map showed how religion is distributed across countries and continents, and how it has changed over time. I also really like the complexity of the visualization and how I could spend hours going through it and comparing countries, but it's also very simple and easy to understand quickly. I think it's effective because it tells a broad story from looking at it holistically, but then gets into the nitty gritty with lots of detail and intricacy at the same time.
The visualization uses mainly size (area) to demonstrate population of a country, and color (hue) to show the breakdown of religion within that country. There is also a numbering system used to reference the name of each country. This simple system allows you to see the distribution of religions across the world from a bird’s eye view, and how it has changed from 50 years ago to now. You can also easily compare and contrast specific countries and visually see how they have changed.
The designers are clear that the data for this visualization comes from the World Religion Data Report from 1945-2010. I believe the purpose for this visualization is to understand the history and to be able to have a visual snapshot of a lot of data (from over 100 countries). One thing I noticed is there are a lot of countries missing from the visualization (there should be 195 countries total). I also would be interested to see the data go further back than 1960, but it’s possible this data wasn’t available. Overall, the visualization is visually pleasing in a simplistic way and serves the purpose the designers intended.