Hello there! I'm currently combing thru various Hetalia character tags and counting the ships that appear for any individual character, and I'm considering doing a write-up like how I see you make them! I'd like to ask you how do you go about formatting/presenting the information? I made a pie chart n everything!
Hi -- that sounds like an awesome project! Very cool. :)
I'll share what I do for data visualization, but I'll also say that there are other ways to do all of this, and depending on your goals, other ways may be better. So this isn't a recommendation -- just insight into my own process.
I use Google Sheets (similar to Excel) to gather/analyze data and to make graphs. (Many other programs/methods would work and have various pros & cons, so if you have a different favorite/you've already made your graphs, no problem! I use Sheets in part because it's easy to share to make my data broadly accessible.)
To get the unified look of my fandom stats -- and because I often want to add additional notes on top of/next to my graphs -- I copy/paste the graphs into Google Slides and add notes/titles/etc there. I have a slide theme that I use to made to get my particular Toastystats look; here's a more generic template of it that you can edit/use yourself, if that's helpful. I like to use it to put a border around my slides (so that if it's on a white background you can still see the edges) and to put my blog credit and the date at the bottom (useful in case someone stumbles across it years later and doesn't realize the data is old, or wants to ask you questions). If you want to change any of the defaults in these template slides (e.g., change the colors or fill in the footer text), you'll need to use the menus to go to "Slide -> Edit theme".
After that, I export each slide as a PNG image ("File -> Download").
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I will also make a quick unsolicited suggestion about pie charts, which you can feel free to ignore: I use bar charts most of the time. I only use pie charts only when I have a bunch of different mutually exclusive categories that add up to 100% -- basically when I can think of the data as creating a "sensible whole pie."
So, for instance, imagine a possible pie here as "Fanworks where Character X is tagged." And I want to show how many of those fanworks have different ship tags. Well, multiple ship tags probably sometimes get used together, which means that actually some of the pie slices (i.e., the ships) should be overlapping, not separate -- and overlapping slices make for weird pie. :) Also, there are probably a large number of Character X tags that don't use any of the ship tags (which at minimum should mean I would also want a large "Other fanworks" slice of pie, if I did use a pie chart). Because of all this, I would probably choose to use a bar chart for that data.
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Feel free to ask more questions if you have them (I recognize that many parts of this could be be confusing, depending on your particular background), and good luck! :)
