Notes
It’s important to realise the trade-off being made here. Compared with a line chart, heatmaps make it more difficult for readers to quantify the individual scores in the data. They are best suited to displaying either “binned” data (continuous data that has been grouped into broader intervals) or simple indices like the political rights data here.
Smith, Alan. How Charts Work (p. 71). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.
Problems with heatmap:
- Difficult for quantify the value
Heatmaps are good for
- binned data - grouped/interval
- a limited range of integers