Comparisons
Content for Monday, October 14, 2024–Friday, October 18, 2024
Readings
- Chapter 9 in Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Wilke 2018)
- 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:
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.
- 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 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: