Amounts and proportions

Content for Thursday, May 14, 2020

Readings

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:


  1. Claus E. Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly Media, 2018), https://serialmentor.com/dataviz/.↩︎

  2. Alberto Cairo, The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication (Berkeley, California: New Riders, 2016).↩︎

  3. Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization.↩︎