In class we learned so many tools for how to visualize data, including Flourish. With Flourish, we learned how to make line charts, bar charts, and my favorite–bar chart races. These all provide an interesting visualization of data, but I wanted to expand and learn something new on Flourish. I recently learned how to make a Parliament Chart– which looks very similar to how it sounds. It is useful for Digital Arts and Humanities because it is a different way of displaying population data. I imagine projects it might be useful for would be something like displaying what portion of art was created in which style. It is helpful for categorical displays, and it even has an interactive aspect which allows you to show change over time.
Here is my step by step tutorial on how to use the Parliament Chart on Flourish:
Step 1: Enter Data
The important thing to note about how to enter the data is that you make sure you have your first column separated as your categories, and then the following columns divided by year (or other component– the columns after A will be displayed on different sheets, and will be compared in growth terms). The data I chose to use was of how people acquired their pet dogs in 2017 and 2021, provided by the Human Society Website. This is the data I input, and the numbers reflect percentages (which I translated to # out of 100).
Step 2: Categorizing Data
As you see on the right in the picture above, the next step is to assign the columns to either “party name” or “seats”. Party name is just a fancy way of saying categories, and seats are just the values associated with each category. For example, the party name for me was the method in which the dogs were acquired, and the seats were the number of dogs (our of ever 100) that were acquired that way.
Step 3: Specifications of Layout
This step was important to adjust how the curve of the “parliament” looked. Initially, the “Number of seats” is set to 650, which didn’t work for my data– this number of seats left a lot of open spots that didn’t look great. Since I was working with data as percentages, I decided to make the number of seats 100. This can be adjusted to your data, and essentially represents your total number.
Step 4: Manipulating the Shape of the Curve
You can also mess around with the size of the arc, which is the size of the outer area of the “parliament seating” and the inner space controls the intensity of the curve on the inside of the arc. These end up being preference in how your chart turns out. For me, I made the inner space a little bit bigger so that it wasn’t as sharp of a curve.
Step 5: Categorical Palette
I thought this step was one of the most important for this graph. The automatic color palette they chose was one that made it hard to distinguish between the categories because the colors were so similar. Changing the color palette makes the seats in the parliament stand out more from each other. There are a lot of choices here, and you can play around with them to see what best represents your data.
Step 6: Final Product!
Take a look at the chart you’ve created and see if it’s what you were hoping for. Play around with the interactive toggle at the top with the dates to see how different your seating chart looks in different years. (below is my final product)
Here are some additional resources to consult on how to make a parliament chart in Flourish:
3 thoughts on “Tutorial Blog Post”
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That is an awesome format for displaying data, and I can already imagine a number of interesting data sets that could be represented with this graph type! This tutorial is straightforward, easy to get through, enthusiastic and interesting. Great job!
Hi Maya,
This is super helpful! I like that you focused on data wrangling since that is the key to getting informative visualization. Flourish has many options; I am curious about what made you choose this visual. Which I personally love and find easy to take in the information. The tutorial was exciting and helpful!
Awesome tutorial! I was excited to read this because I, too, enjoy working in Flourish. I’ve seen this kind of data visualization used in political visuals, but I loved seeing it put to use in a different context! It makes it so easy for your eye to tell what the breakdown is of where dogs come from when you use the Parliament Chart, especially with the distinct colors. I’ll definitely be investigating this type of chart for my own data. Nice job!