Comments on: Slopegraphs to Visualise Beer Data?

By: Jeff Alworth

Jeff Alworth — Thu, 03 May 2012 16:32:21 +0000

True. There are some rich possibilities, but they would take care and effort. History provides a lot of rich opportunity–the waxing and waning of styles, the shifts within styles, the way beers influence each other.

By: Alan

Alan — Wed, 02 May 2012 18:24:13 +0000

But, while I agree, there is no point not experimenting as the topic of good beer has not been subject to any real graph work – only those marching stairs of the BA’s annual release that US craft been is dominant as it has captured 6.9% of the market share, etc…

By: Jeff Alworth

Jeff Alworth — Wed, 02 May 2012 16:15:46 +0000

It’s so bizarre to see Tufte having his moment among the beer bloggers. When I was doing research professionally–where Tufte is much admired–I would never have guessed this boomlet was on the distant horizon.

These tools he suggests (along with sparklines, which you detail today) have fairly limited utility in my experience. They’re good to know about as one way to present data, but no magic bullets. His larger point, that the presentation of data can be useless, utilitarian, or instantly illuminating, is his greater insight.

By: Maxwell

Maxwell — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:22:37 +0000

2 Olympic swimming pools of Hophead, a bag of pork scratchings and some dry roasted nuts please, sweetheart!

By: Alan

Alan — Wed, 02 May 2012 12:07:47 +0000

The allegation of “unnatural” is just sweet. I think we need to start a campaign for real graphical representations of data. CAMRAGARADA?

The point is well made but your graph is simply not correctly titled. Title it pre-WWI shifts in Whitbread customer preferences and it is quite illuminating. That their out put altered so drastically in a ten year period begs a lot of questions.

By: Bailey

Bailey — Wed, 02 May 2012 11:31:45 +0000

And the swimming pool is still a legal measure in British pubs, as long as it is crown-stamped and lined to indicate the 2,500,000 litre mark.

By: iamreddave

iamreddave — Wed, 02 May 2012 11:15:20 +0000

Say a barrel held 140L (thanks wikipedia). An Olympic swimming pool holds
25m x 50m x 2m = 2,500m3; 1L = 0.001m3 so 2,500 x 1000 = 2,500,000L
So an Olympic swimming pool is 20833 barrels
So porter had 297122 in 1904 and 382984 in 1914
or in 1904 14.26 olympic swimming pools were drank and in 1914 18.38.

By: Bailey

Bailey — Wed, 02 May 2012 09:38:55 +0000

Lars — Boak and I were talking about this over breakfast (as you do) and came to the same conclusion. A slope will show you relative changes in ranking — IPA overtook pale ale — but it would be really easy to manipulate the data this way. What if, in 1904, IPA was at a freakish low, for example?

Next up, though, sparklines…

By: Lars Marius Garshol

Lars Marius Garshol — Wed, 02 May 2012 09:32:19 +0000

The trouble with slopegraphs is that they only visualize two-column tables, whereas in a case like this you really want to see all the years 1904-1914, and a slopegraph won’t do that for you.

A normal line chart with more data points would IMHO be a lot more useful. In fact, that would be really nice.

By: Bailey

Bailey — Wed, 02 May 2012 08:25:25 +0000

Really? We both tend to go to graphs, charts and maps the minute we have any kind of data to get our heads round.

(Of course the above exercise was *literally* contrived — we wanted to see how slopegraphs worked and picked a nice neat set of data to play with. There is no pressing need for this diagram otherwise.)