Effective visuals | Alignment, proximity | Typography
Readings due before class on Wednesday, November 1, 2017
Required
- Chapter 2 in Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, Storytelling with DataCole Nussbaumer Knaflic, Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2015).
- Engaging Readers with Square Pie/Waffle Charts
- Understanding Pie Charts
- Square pie chart beats out the rest in perception study
- Two Alternatives to Using a Second Y-Axis & Illusion of success & Dissecting two axes
- Dual-Scaled Axes in Graphs: Are They Ever the Best Solution?Stephen Few, “Dual-Scaled Axes in Graphs: Are They Ever the Best Solution?” Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter, March 2008, http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/dual-scaled_axes.pdf.
- The start-at-zero rule
Recommended
- Ian Spence, “No Humble Pie: The Origins and Usage of a Statistical Chart”Ian Spence, “No Humble Pie: The Origins and Usage of a Statistical Chart,” Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics 30, nos. 4, Winter (2005): 353–68, doi:10.3102/10769986030004353.
- Jeffrey Heer and Michael Bostock, “Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception: Using Mechanical Turk to Assess Visualization Design”Jeffrey Heer and Michael Bostock, “Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception: Using Mechanical Turk to Assess Visualization Design,” in ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2010, 203–12, doi:10.1145/1753326.1753357.
- Kieran Healy, “Two y-axes”
- “A Study on Dual-Scale Data Charts”Petra Isenberg et al., “A Study on Dual-Scale Data Charts,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 17, no. 12 (2011): 2469–78, doi:10.1109/tvcg.2011.160.
Questions to reflect on
- How does the type of visualizations help or hinder our search for truth in data?
- Why are pie charts and curved lines generally unacceptable? When are pie and donut charts acceptable?
- How can you correctly and honestly communicate relationships between variables? How can you communicate the uncertainty in those relationships?
- When is it appropriate to use two y-axes?
- When is it okay (or not) to truncate the y-axis?