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Speech bubble browser

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Speech bubble browser
Guardian interactive diagram showing proportion of words devoted to particular themes during Gordon Brown's speech to US congress (March 2009).
Visual types
Level of expertise
Source:
Guardian Interactive (News)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/interactive/2009/mar/04/gordon-brown-congress-speech-obama
Interactive features
User can click on bubbles to focus on and bring up relevant information/quotes.
Benefits & pitfalls to avoid
  • Using area or volume to represent data can distort data values, and exaggerate differences between values. For example, if the radius of the circle is used to represent data values, the area of the circle will quadruple if the data values double. There is also an issue of 'perceptual scaling' - the tendency of people to underestimate areas.
Create your own
  • Bubble charts can be created in a range of standard data applications such as Excel.