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:

• What’s a reproducible example (reprex) and how do I do one?
• So you’ve been asked to make a reprex
• The reprex package

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.)

• 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

• Introduction
• Visualizing comparisons
• Reproducible examples

Videos

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

• Introduction
• Visualizing comparisons
• Reproducible examples

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