A data giraffe is a situation where a very prominent data point shades everything else. I learned this term from a post by Pini Yakuel and immediately liked it a lot.


Dealing with data giraffes is hard, especially when dealing with bar charts. Today I saw one interesting approach to this problem
Katherine S. Rowell is a co-funder of a Boston firm that specializes in data visualization. In December, she published a post dedicated to one of the most popular but also most abused graph types, the bar charts. One of the examples in her post demonstrates a nice treatment of data giraffes

In this example, Katherine draws the graph twice. The zoomed-out version shows the giraffes in all their glory, while the zoomed-in one gives the spotlight to the foxes, hyenas, and mice.
Also, note how these graphs respect the rules that every bar chart has to include the zero.
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