Time

Readings due before class on Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Required

• Chapter 8 in Alberto Cairo, The Truthful ArtAlberto Cairo, The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication (Berkeley, California: New Riders, 2016).
  
  
• The Nuclear Threat—The Shadow Peace, part 1
• 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time – A Guide
• A bunch of (really) short blog posts:
  • What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York (just look at the picture; you don’t need to read this unless you’re really curious about trends in 311 calls)
  • 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

• The Fallen of World War II
• 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)

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.)?