Creating Frames for the Bar Chart Race

Learn how to create frames for the bar chart race animation.

In this lesson, we’ll learn how to create individual frames for an animated bar chart race using Python’s Matplotlib library. Frames are essential components that depict the evolution of data over time in an animation. Mastering the creation of frames will allow you to visualize dynamic data trends effectively.

Understanding the frames

Frames represent snapshots of data at specific time points in an animation. Each frame corresponds to a single instance in time and contains visual representations of the data at that moment. In the context of a bar chart race, each frame illustrates the relative positions or proportions of categories (e.g., programming languages) at a particular time.

Frame for a single bar chart

We’ve created a bar chart representing one month’s data—one frame. The following code creates only one frame:

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import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# Load the dataset from the CSV file
df = pd.read_csv('programming_language_popularity.csv')
date = df['Date'].iloc[0]  # Get the date for January 2011
data = df.drop(columns=['Date']).iloc[0]  # Exclude the 'Date' column and get the data for January 2011
data_sorted = data.sort_values(ascending=True)  # Sort data in descending order of popularity
languages = data_sorted.index.tolist()  # Get the languages
popularity = data_sorted.values  # Get the popularity values
colors = {'Python': 'skyblue', 'Java': 'orange', 'JavaScript': 'green', 'C/C++': 'red', 'C#': 'purple',
          'PHP': 'brown', 'Ruby': 'pink', 'R': 'gray', 'Go': 'pink'}
plt.figure(figsize=(10, 6))
# Create the horizontal bar chart
plt.barh(languages, popularity, color=[colors[lang] for lang in languages])
# Set title and labels
plt.title('Programming Language Popularity in January 2011')
plt.xlabel('Popularity')
plt.ylabel('Language')
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

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Creating Frames for the Bar Chart Race

Understanding the frames

Frame for a single bar chart