The Dataviz Community Survey 2019 Challenge
The Dataviz Community just announced their latest competition, The Data Visualization Community Survey 2019 Challenge. The community has been conducting surveys since 2017 which covers professional data visualization details like salary and hourly compensation, tool use, location, demographic data, audiences, organizational structure and more.
I decided to take a peek at the data and explore and join if I find something interesting. What got my attention with the dataset initially are the ethnicity and gender data and maybe decided to focus on these parameters. Unfortunately, the ethnicity data is only available in the 2017 data. To be qualified for the competition, the 2019 is a requirement in order to join. Alternatively, I finalized my data using the information related to country and gender for the 2019 which may still represent information on the diversity of the origin and gender diversity of the community.
Here is the links to the results if you wish to download or explore it on your own: Dataviz Community Survey Results on Github
Tadaa! Here’s My Entry: How Represented Are You In The Dataviz Community?
We try to look at how the rest of the world is represented by the dataviz community in terms of country and gender. Below is my entry for the Dataviz Community Survey 2019 Challenge.
Note: I may interchange the terms Dataviz Community or Society from time to time as I notice that the community also use the two interchangeably.
View full graphic here
Insights
Representation Distribution
We visualize the Representation Index by density distribution for each gender. Here are my observations:
- There’s a shift between the two gender where womens’ distribution appears to be lower than mens’
- USA and Canada shows to be heavily dense and highly represented
- Most of Europe are highly represented
- Most of Asia are underrepresented
- China seems to be at the bottom of the scale with a representation index lower than 0.01. A lower number of membership in DVS and a country with the highest population in the world might have caused this extremely low index.
DVS and World Population Comparison
- +50% of the USA & Canada subregion are most members of the DVS where this region only represents around 6% of the world population
- East Asia and South Asia have around +40% of the total population combined but their representation in the Dataviz community is lesser than 10% combined
How I did it
I started exploring the data from the Dataviz Community Survey and also sourced other data from the UN Data and World Bank for the world population. I moved back and forth from R into Illustrator to reshape the data and import back to Illustrator.
Why Compare It With The Rest Of The World?
No doubt that the Data Visualization Society is considered to be a worldwide community for data visualization practicioners, which I assume to be the biggest community in the field. It would be fair to say that it can be considered as a worldwide organization for data visualization.
Why Representation Matters?
Different views and opinions matters and these views and opinions are shaped by everyone’s background, experiences and culture. We don’t want to end up sailing the ship in a single direction unknowingly, a danger is ahead of us. Having different views could provide us to better alternative options and to other better directions.
Do We Need More People Like You To Diversify The Dataviz Community?
This is the point of the dataviz, to know whether you should invite other people coming from the same background as you join the community. Your views and opinions matter and why not provide a better light to the community?
