A friend recently drew my attention to Ausviz, a site focussed on visualizations of Australian data, particularly data sets from data.gov.au. One of the first Ausviz visualizations I looked at uses a force-directed graph to visualize changes in public service staffing levels arising from the 2014/15 Federal Budget. The graph represents the hierarchy of ministries and departments, with the size and colour of leaf nodes encoding the change in departmental headcounts.
An alternative way of visualizing hierarchies is to use a treemap. The hierarchy is represented by a nested layout of rectangles. The size and colour of the rectangles is used to encode dimensions of the data.
So, taking inspiration from the Ausviz visualization I implemented a treemap to visualize the same data. The layout of rectangles represents the hierarchy of Federal Government ministries and departments. Rectangle sizes encode the numbers of staff in each department (2013/14 or 2014/15). Rectangle colours encode the changes in staffing levels (absolute or relative). The colour scale ranges from red (staff decrease) through white (no change) to green (staff increase).
The treemap is shown below. An interactive version can be found here (fullscreen). You will need a "modern" browser to use the interactive version, which supports the following operations:
- change the size encoding (2013/14 or 2014/15)
- change the colour encoding (absolute or relative)
- drill down into a ministry (click on a rectangle)
- mouse over a rectangle to display a departmental tool-tip
The treemap allows us to quickly see where the biggest changes, both absolute and relative, are to occur:
- Size: 2013/14; Change: absolute (we see the big winners and losers)
- Gain: Dept. Foreign Affairs & Trade - 1659, 42%
- Gain: Dept. Prime Minister & Cabinet - 1543, 200%
- Gain: Dept. Defence - 604, 1%
- Loss: Dept. Employment, Education & Workplace Relations - 3740, 100%
- Loss: Australian Taxation Office - 2954, 13%
- Size: 2014/15; Change: absolute (we see the new, large departments and agencies)
- New: Dept. Employment - 1716
- New: Dept. Education - 1823
- New: National Disability Insurance Agency - 798
- Size: 2013/14; Change: relative (we see shut down departments and agencies)
- Gone: AusAID - 1982
- Gone: Dept. Resources, Energy & Tourism - 655
- Gone: Dept. Regional Australia, Local Govt. Arts & Sports - 482
- Gone: Health Workforce Australia - 140
- Gone: Clean Energy Finance Corp. - 50
- Gone: Wine Australia Corp. - 49
- Gone: Australian National Preventative Health Agency - 40
- Gone: Climate Change Authority - 35
- Gone: Telecommunications Universal Service Management Agency - 17
- Gone: Grape & Wine R&D Corp. - 11
- Gone: Sugar Development R&D Corp. - 8
- Size: 2014/15; Change: relative (we see the new, small departments and agencies)
- New: Australian Grape & Wine Authority - 55
The treemap was implemented using D3.js, and borrowed heavily from a couple of excellent examples:
Source data comes from Budget Paper 4 Table 2.2 Average Staffing Table. Note the many footnotes associated with this data.
The source-code is available on Github and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
