# inkblot: an alternative to stacked bar graphs

February 25, 2010
By

(This article was first published on factbased, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

Sometimes it is not easy to get useful information from a stacked bar chart, see for instance
this blogpost at Support Analytics.

So-called inkblot charts, as discussed at Kaiser Fung's
Junk Charts, allow the reader to focus on the evolution
of a time series.

Now how to make this kind of charts with R? I asked on
StackOverflow. The given answers led to an implementation
of an inkblot function. It is delivered with the wzd package on r-forge. Here is an example which visualizes the income per capita from
various countries, as reported by gapminder:

> #install.packages("wzd")> library(wzd)> data(gmIncomePerCapita)> selection <- window(gmIncomePerCapita, +     start=as.Date("1900-01-01"), +     end=as.Date("2008-01-01")+     )[,c("Germany", "India", "Japan", "Norway", "United States", "Venezuela")]> inkblot(selection, min.height=1300)