Amounts and proportions
Readings
- Chapter 6 in Claus Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization1
- Chapter 6 in Alberto Cairo, The Truthful Art2
- Chapter 10 in Claus Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization3
- Engaging Readers with Square Pie/Waffle Charts
- Understanding Pie Charts
- Square pie chart beats out the rest in perception study
- Twitter thread from John Burn-Murdoch on why the Financial Times uses log scales in their COVID-19 tracking charts
- Tweet and Twitter thread from John Burn-Murdoch on why the Financial Times doesn’t use population-adjusted numbers in their COVID-19 tracking charts
- Video from the Financial Times about the design decisions behind their COVID-19 tracking charts
Questions to reflect on
- How do these types of visualizations help or hinder our search for truth in data?
- What do you think of the Financial Times explanations of their use of absolute numbers (not per capita numbers) and log scales (not regular scales)? How have these decisions affected your perception of the pandemic? How have they affected others’ perceptions?
Slides
The slides for today’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.
View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides
Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.
Videos
Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.
You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:
Claus E. Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly Media, 2018), https://serialmentor.com/dataviz/.↩︎
Alberto Cairo, The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication (Berkeley, California: New Riders, 2016).↩︎
Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization.↩︎