I loved Chris’ original treemap (for reasons explained below). When it was made Viz of the Day, I heard lots of people say that it was a terrible choice: “you can’t make any insight out of that treemap”, they said. However, I sat in a big group of customers and partners that day, and showed the viz on a screen. What happened? They engaged in it – the treemap generated curiosity in a way my bar chart doesn’t. The subtle use of highlighting on Chris’ original teases people into exploring the data.
However, one of the first things I’d noticed was that the most common words were also the most common words in English. For my makeover, I wanted to exclude those words. I downloaded that data from Wikipedia.
It turns out that ‘baby’, ‘oh’ and ‘yeah’ are the most common of the uncommon words (if I did this again, I probably exclude the next few hundred common words to start getting to the uncommon ones). I like that “Na” is in this list solely because of Hey Jude.
I did recreate Chris’ original too:
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