Dataviz of the week: 8/3/17

Corinne Riddell posted this on Twitter. It’s one version of multiple time series that she tried out, one for each USA state. It’s not the finished article, but is really nice for its combination of that recognisable shape (I suppose if your country has a dull shape like Portugal — no offence — then readers won’t immediately recognise the meaning of the arrangement) and the clean, simple small multiples. Admittedly, the time series has enough signal:noise to make this possible, and only a few unusual states, and without that it might start to get like spaghetti, but it’s always worth sketching options like this out to see how they work.

Could the state names get dropped? Probably not, but they could turn into two-letter abbreviations. The whole idea of the small multiple is that it’s not a precise x-y mapping but a general impression, so the y-axis labels could go (just as there are no x-axis labels).

Overall, I really like it and would like to write up a UK function for this to add to my dataviz toolbox.