Data from German Federal Statistics Portal
Graphics by Lily Houtman
The interactive graphics above serve two purposes. First, to explore health and environment data by German state. Explore the differences in type of waste, type of renewable energy, and investments in environmental regulations. When changing the attribute, notice that the scale of the chart does not change. A consistent scale makes comparisons between attributes easier, and makes extremely large or small values stand out.
Second, use the radio buttons on the bottom left of the page to reclassify data by natural breaks (to emphasize clusters), quantile (to have the same number of data points in each class), and equal interval (to have each class the same size). When changing the class type, it is easy to see that small changes in data classification can have large impacts on the perception of data. Therefore, when presented data, individuals must always be wary of the purpose of the researcher.