Unpacking charts
Let’s practice thinking about the data behind the graphic. For your assigned graphic, consider:
The “what’s going on in this graph?” guiding questions
What do you notice?
What do you wonder?
How does this relate to you and your community?
Create a catchy headline that captures the graphs’ main idea.
Also consider these questions:
How many variable are represented in the chart?
What types of variables are they? (categorical? quantitative?)
What observational units are represented?
What would the original dataset have looked like? Try drawing out a few rows of the data. (Sometimes it’s possible to read values directly off the chart, other times you might need to make something up based on the axes.)
What mappings were used (common ones are x, y, color)?
Example graphics
- Coastal Cities Priced Out Low-Wage Workers. Now College Graduates Are Leaving, Too. Emily Badger, Robert Gebeloff and Josh Katz. NYTimes.
- Do voters want Republicans or Democrats in Congress? FiveThirtyEight.
- ER visits for Christmas decoration-related injuries increase after Thanksgiving. USAFacts.
- Officials Failed to Act When COVID Hit Prisons. A New Study Shows the Deadly Cost. Anna Flagg, Jamiles Lartey and Shannon Heffernan, The Marshall Project.
- Mapping America’s access to nature, neighborhood by neighborhood. Harry Stevens, The Washington Post.
- Happiness of the younger, the older, and those in between. World Happiness Report. (Scroll way down for the graphic!)
Disciplinary graphics
See if you can find a data visualization related to your discipline, your class, your research, etc. Journal articles can be a good place to start. You can try googling [discipline] + “data visualization.” Otherwise, some places I tend to look for examples:
New York Times “What’s Going On in This Graph?” discussions
Nathan Yau’s website, FlowingData
Nightingale, journal of the Data Visualization Society
Information is Beautiful, particularly their yearly awards