I came up with a weekly R challenge as a way to “force” myself into learning new things. One figure, every week! The catch is that every time I should be trying something new… maybe I’ll use a new type of visualization, or maybe I’ll explore a new dataset. Initially I thought it would be neat if there was some unifying topic, e.g. water, but, then I decided to keep it open.
Weekly R Challenge, Entry #4
I was randomly browsing through the Danish statistics site, trying to find something interesting related to water or environment. While browsing, I got the idea to check also the demographic data, and while I was on the demographics, I somehow came up to this peculiar graph on divorce rates. I did not know that divorce rate in Denmark is so high (40-50%). The number was so striking, I did not know how to understand it. How can a country be leading in both happiness and divorce rates at the same time?
The Telegraph tried to find an answer on a similar question (read more: Denmark’s divorce express). Busines Insider also wrote about this here. So, after two days and couple of conversations about it, I decided to use this data for my next figure in R. I was thinking about the Danish landscape, and the weather (currently freezing!), so initially I wanted to do something in green-grey, but then I found the Moody Blue Hues Color Palette here. I love the blue color from this palette, so instead of landscape, I switched to the seascape area. I really wanted to make the graph more on the illustration side. I also wanted to show the number of marriages on the same graph, because I thought there may have been some trend in that too. While browsing through the data, I also learned that from 15 June 2012 it became possible for two persons of the same sex to get married (and divorced afterwards). So, the marriages data after 2012 includes the same-sex marriages (total number marriages).
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