Time

Readings

• Chapter 8 in Alberto Cairo, The Truthful Art¹
• 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 Paradox²
• How To Fix a Toilet (And Other Things We Couldn’t Do Without Search)

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.)

• 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.)?

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
• Axis issues
• Visualizing time
• Starting, ending, and decomposing time

Videos

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

• Introduction
• Axis issues
• Visualizing time
• Starting, ending, and decomposing time

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