My family and I love Cornwall. From the white sand and turquoise water at Porthcurno in the south-west, to the Atlantic surf and beach shacks of Bude on the north coast. It's beautiful and wild and the kids love it. During lockdown I've been thinking about Cornwall a lot, counting down the days to an unknown time in the future when we can safely travel again.
A few years ago I used some data I found on cornish beaches to create two designs, one which was done using code, the other was hand-drawn. Both contrasted the north and south coast beaches, both used a beach/sea colour scheme, but one highlighted blue flag beaches, the other communicated a more granular level of detail, beach facilities. I also used different data visualisation paradigms, one a treemap, the other you might call a sunburst chart. The latter remains unfinished and sits in a drawer somewhere.
Treemap
Visualising the dat like this allows us to clearly see that there are (were) more Blue Flag beaches in the North than in the South, even though there appear to be a great many more beaches on the South Coast. Interesting! The next takeaway is that while beaches on the south coast are fairly evenly split between shingle/rock and sandy, the north coast is primarily made up of sandy beaches.
As always with hierarchical data, the order of the hierarchy is key. So we ask questions as we follow the hierarchy down. Which coast has most beaches? Are beaches on the south coast mostly sandy or rocky? What is the area with most sandy beaches on the south coast?
Beach 'type' is higher in the hierarchy than town/area, so this visualisation is not optimised to communicate which town/area has most sandy beaches. For that we'd have to switch the positions of the beach type-town/area in the visual hierarchy. Then we could see that for example Newquay has 7 sandy and 2 shingle/rocky beaches.
Sunburst
Visualising the data like this allows a more nuanced approach to the position of the 'leaf nodes', the beaches. We can look at the circle almost like a compass and not only group beaches by north/south coast, but order them by geographical position along the coast. The stacked and colour coded bars represent beach facilities and we can see immediately the areas with better equipped beached..
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