Amounts and proportions

Readings

• Chapter 6 in Claus Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization¹
• Chapter 6 in Alberto Cairo, The Truthful Art²
• Chapter 10 in Claus Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization³
• Engaging Readers with Square Pie/Waffle Charts
• Understanding Pie Charts
• Square pie chart beats out the rest in perception study
• Twitter thread from John Burn-Murdoch on why the Financial Times uses log scales in their COVID-19 tracking charts
• 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

Recommended

• See how to create your own COVID-19 tracking chart with R

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.)

• 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

• Introduction
• Reproducibility
• Amounts
• Proportions

Videos

Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.

• Introduction
• Reproducibility
• Amounts
• Proportions

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here: