What do we think of the "packed" bar chart?

Xan Gregg - my partner in the #onelesspie campaign to replace terrible Wikipedia pie charts one at a time - has come up with a new chart form that he calls "packed bars". It's a combination of bar charts and the treemap.

Here is an example of a packed barchart, in which the top 10 companies on the S&P500 index are displayed:

What he's doing is to add context to help interpret the data. So frequently these days, we encounter data analyses of the "Top X" or "Bottom Y" type. Such analyses are extremely limited in utility as it ignores the bulk of the data. The extreme values have little to nothing to say about the rest of the data. This problem is particularly acute in skewed data.

Compare the two versions:

The left chart is a Top 10 analysis. The reader knows nothing about the market cap of the other 490 companies. The right chart provides the context. We can see that the Top 10 companies have a combined market cap that is roughly a quarter of the total market cap in the S&P 500. We also learn about the size of the next 10 versus the Top 10, etc.

As with any chart form, a nice dataset can really surface its power. I really like what the packed barchart reveals about the election data by county:

(Thanks to Xan for providing me this image.)

Notice the preponderance of red on the right side and the gradual shift from blue/purple to pink/red moving left to right. This is very effective at showing one of the most important patterns in American politics - the small counties are mostly deep red while the Democratic base is to be found primarily in large metropolitan areas. I have previously featured a number of interesting election graphics here. Washington Post's nation of peaks is another way to surface this pattern.

Xan would love to get feedback about this chart type. He has put up a blog post here with more details. I also love this animation he created to show how the packing occurs.