Title
Proportions in categorical and geographic data: visualizing the results of political elections
Abstract
Colorpleth maps are commonly used to display election results, either by using one distinct color for representing the winning party in each district or by showing a proportion between two parties on a bi-polar colormap, for example, from red to blue representing Republicans vs. Democrats. Showing only the largest party may disable insights into the data whereas using bipolar colormaps works only reasonably well in cases of two parties. To overcome these limitations we introduce a new technique for visualizing proportions in such categorical data. In particular, we combine bipolar colormaps with an adapted double-rendering of polygons to simultaneously visually represent the first two categories and the spatial location. Our technique enables the recognition of close election results as well as clear majorities in a scalable manner. We proof our concept by applying our technique in a prototype implementation used to display election results from the U. S. Presidential election in 2008 and elections of the German Bundestag in 2005 and 2009. Different interesting findings are presented, which would not be recognizable when visualizing only the winner. As we additionally represent the party with the second most votes, we are able to show changes in the spatial distribution of the votes as well as outlier regions with exceptional results. Our visualization technique therefore enables valuable insights into categorical data with a spatial reference.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1145/2254556.2254644
AVI
Keywords
Field
DocType
close election result,spatial distribution,election result,u. s. presidential election,categorical data,political election,visualization technique,bipolar colormaps,largest party,geographic data,spatial location,new technique,data mining,information visualization,visual analytics,knowledge discovery,data visualization
Data mining,Polygon,Information visualization,Information retrieval,Visualization,Categorical variable,Presidential election,Computer science,Outlier,Visual analytics,Human–computer interaction,Knowledge extraction
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.36
8
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Florian Stoffel11069.38
Halldor Janetzko231220.69
Florian Mansmann358935.91