Comparisons
Readings
- Chapter 9 in Claus Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization1
- Mike Bostock, “Methods of Comparison, Compared”. Explanation of the differences between showing relative differences, absolute differences, and log ratios.
- Sparkline theory and practice. This is a collection of posts by Edward Tufte about sparklines—scroll down a ways and check out his examples, analysis, and critiques.
- Time series sparklines
- Comparisons with lollipop charts. If you’re feeling adventurous (and you should!), do this tutorial as you read it.
Reproducible examples
Reprexes (or reproducible examples) are the best way to (1) get help online and (2) fix issues on your own.
Making a good reprex is tricky, but it’s a very valuable skill to know (regardless of programming language!). Here are some helpful resources for making them:
Questions to reflect on
- These readings all show a ton of new ways to present comparisons. Which ones are your favorite? Which ones didn’t quite click with you? In what situations are some more appropriate than others?
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/.↩︎