I saw a link from a twitter feed about visualizing salary data, and it made me think of our teachers and Unit 4 administrators; the BART employees were seriously considering a strike, and at the last moment decided not to – not unlike our own local scenario. I am curious, what do readers think of this visualization? Is it relatively intuitive? Easy to use? Informative? Helpful?
Personally, I liked the interactive feel of it. I like that the data points can be filtered for various levels of detail. I was not crazy about the color scheme at all, but at least it allows you different ways of seeing the same data. He has a couple more visualizations here: http://enjalot.github.io/bart/
Of course, the premise is that one has access to the raw data. Unfortunately, that is a huge stumbling block in our local situation.
Citizen4: A citizen's blog about Champaign Unit 4 
14 October 2013 at 8:46 pm
I need help understanding what the various colored dots are depicting. The interactive aspect is fun, but I do not understand the story.
14 October 2013 at 9:08 pm
I agree, the colors are not self-explanatory. Ok, one drop-down says “Union”, but what does blue mean and what does orange mean? If you hover over a dot, you can see what their union representation is, which correlates to a color. So blue is “non-represented”.
The “story” is spelled out in a little more detail via the blog. So yes, the infographic all by itself is missing a lot of contextual information, but it does serve as a good prop.
14 October 2013 at 9:37 pm
Thanks for the explanation. This does help.