Change over time

Readings due before class on Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Required

• Chapter 8 in Alberto Cairo, The Truthful ArtAlberto Cairo, The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication (Berkeley, California: New Riders, 2016).
  
  
• Chapter 9 in Stephanie Evergreen, Effective Data VisualizationStephanie D. H. Evergreen, Effective Data Visualization: The Right Chart for the Right Data (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2017).
  
  
• The Nuclear Threat—The Shadow Peace, part 1
• A bunch of (really) short blog posts:
  • Streamgraphs: Economic trade flows with R
  • A century of ocean shipping animated
  • What is seasonal adjustment and why is it used?
  • The start-at-zero rule
  • Keeping one’s appetite after touring the sausage factory
  • How Common is Your Birthday? This Visualization Might Surprise You

Recommended

• Visualizing Statistical Mix Effects and Simpson’s ParadoxZan Armstrong and Martin Wattenberg, “Visualizing Statistical Mix Effects and Simpson’s Paradox,” in Proceedings of IEEE InfoVis 2014, 2014, https://research.google.com/pubs/pub42901.html.
  
  
• How To Fix a Toilet (And Other Things We Couldn’t Do Without Search)
• 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time – A Guide
• The Fallen of World War II

Questions to reflect on

• When is it okay (or not) to truncate the y-axis?
• It is remarkably easy to mislead people with many of these chart types. Why? How can you avoid the same mistakes?
• All these types of charts are good at communicating change over time, but some are more appropriate in different situations. When is it best to use these different types (e.g. line graphs vs. area graphs vs. horizon charts vs. heatmaps, etc.)?