Amounts and proportions
Content for Monday, September 16, 2024–Friday, September 20, 2024
Readings
- Chapter 6 in Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Wilke 2018)
- Chapter 6 in The Truthful Art (Cairo 2016)
- Chapter 10 in Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Wilke 2018)
- Engaging Readers with Square Pie/Waffle Charts
- Understanding Pie Charts
- Square pie chart beats out the rest in perception study
- 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
Possible questions to reflect on
Remember, you don’t need to answer all of these—or even any of them! These are just here to help guide your thinking. All that matters is that you show good engagement with the readings.
- 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 this week’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.
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: