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coffeesharkpie t1_j5l2zl8 wrote

Wow, that's a beautiful graph! Still, it leaves me extremely torn as its beauty alone just can't get me over critiquing its functionality. But devisive is good, as devisive gets people to talk.

Mind sharing a bit more information on the R packages and approach you used?

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cremepat OP t1_j5law6s wrote

I get you, I was cautious about this viz for that exact reason. I do love looking at data art, but some of it really doesn't resonate with me because I can't understand what point is being made (and as a data journo that's my whole job lol)

I've done this exact analysis three years running and was getting bored of the same old traditional-ish visuals I'd been doing. I wanted to do something completely different to re-engage myself in the creative process.

I fiddled with a lot of "field of flowers" ideas using geom_bezier in ggplot to make curved "stems" showing the length of the books I read, and layered geom_points to make flowers colored to represent the genres. Everything I worked on in that vein felt like I was ripping off Valentina D'efilippo.

I randomly adding in a coord_polar to my plot and really liked the output. From there, I refined in ggplot (eg removing the flower heads) and gussied it up in Illustrator

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