Introduction

The Item view was added to Omniscope Evo in September 2021. It is currently an experimental view. Once we have gathered sufficient feedback we intend to make it a core view.

In this article we will provide a short overview of the Item view.

What is the Item view?

The Item provides a similar visualisation to the Pie view. It allows you to configure a split and a measure, however instead of representing the split values as segments, they are instead represented as individual dots. For example if a split has a measure value of twenty, it is represented by twenty dots. It is important to use colour to differentiate the dots from one split value to another.

The Item view can be laid out as a parliament structure, a circle, semi circle or a rectangle. For all layouts except rectangle labels are shown on each split breakdown. 

Example

In this example we are going to use the Item view to visualise the United Kingdom House of Commons composition following the 2019 general election.

We can find this data on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MPs_elected_in_the_2019_United_Kingdom_general_election

Lets start by creating a new Omniscope file. Now we need to import the data for our report. On the Wikipedia page the data is listed as a table:

We cannot export this as a CSV or another file format, so our best option is to use a Text input block. In the Omniscope workflow, add a Text input block and click on the block to open the options. Now select all the rows in the table on the Wikipedia page and copy to the clipboard, switch back to the Omniscope file and select the cell, then paste the clipboard data. Omniscope will automatically add the rows and fields needed:

We now need to name the fields and clean the data (removing the [a] and [b] suffix from the first two rows), your resulting table should appear as shown below:

Our data preparation is now complete and we can move on to creating our report. Add a new Blank report block and connect it to the Text input block. Click on the report block to open. Now click on the Add view button and select the Item view:

Omniscope has automatically applied a default configuration; splitting by affiliation and a Record count measure. As a result we see a single marker for each party. We would like to show a marker for each party member. Open the Measure options in the toolbar at the top of the view and change the measure value to Current members. Now lets sort the data by the number of members, with the biggest party shown first. Open the Split options in the toolbar and set the Sort direction to Descending.

In the visualisation above we can clearly see that the Conservatives command an overall majority in the parliament.

In the UK each party has an associated colour (eg. the Conservative party is blue, Labour is red). Again Wikipedia provides a list of all the party colours here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Index_of_United_Kingdom_political_parties_meta_attributes

Ideally we want the marker colour to reflect the party colour. We can achieve this by clicking on the 3 dots (...) menu in the top right corner and clicking Report settings, then switching to the FIELD STYLES tab. Now its simply a process of setting the colour for each party individually by clicking on the coloured box and pasting the hex value listed on the Wikipedia page:

If we want, we can change the layout of the view by opening the Style menu and clicking on the Layout dropdown, for example selecting the Rectangle layout will show:

You can download the Omniscope file below. As always we would love to hear your thoughts, so please get in touch if you have any questions or feedback.