Data Visualization

Data Visualization

Warming stripes

Alice McGrath | 25 February 2025

Overview

  1. Discussion of the readings
  2. Reviewing examples
  3. What makes a good data viz?

Readings & discussion

Data X Design

Two nineteenth-century data visualizations

Visualzations by William Playfair (left) and Shanawdithit (right), from Data x Design, Introduction

“Introduction: A Counterhistory of Data Visulization”

  • What is important about the visual & digital form of this chapter?
  • Why does it matter which examples we use to tell the history of data visualization?

Data Humanism

Giorgia Lupi: “The Revolution will be Visualized”

Data Humanism

Data Humanism, a visual manifesto, by Giorgia Lupi

What makes data “human”?

What about “humanistic”?

Visualization examples

Ex. 1 Warming Stripes

Data viz with red and blue stripes

Ed Hawkins, University of Reading, 2018. See also this interactive version here or read more about its growing influence

  • What’s the message of this viz?
  • Why is this effective?

Ex. 2: Wealth, shown to scale

screengrab of wealth viz

Matt Korostoff (2021); NB: the original version (MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth) is no longer available, this adaptation by Omar A. Douglass is pretty close: Wealth To Scale, adapted for classroom. Various other translations and adaptations are available here.

Ex. 3: Dunham’s Data

Interactive Flow of Katherine Dunham’s Dancers, Drummers, and Singers (2019)

Ex. 4: Reach of Racism

screenshot of punishing reach viz

NY Times: Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys (3/19/2018)

W.E.B. Du Bois: Data Portraits

valuation of taxable property

Chart from Du Bois’s 1900 “The Exhibition of American Negroes,” featured in Data by Design ch. 5

See also

Other examples

Questions to ask

  • How does it affect you? Why?
  • What message is it trying to communicate?
  • What questions does it raise?

What makes a good data viz?

Inspiration

Correlation is not causation

cage pool viz

See other Spurious Correlations, by Tyler Vigen.

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