Visualization Guide
Due: Thursday February 21
Undergrad: Approx 500 words total, 2 types per person
Grad: Approx 1000 words total, 2 types per person
Visualization guide posts should be aimed at an audience of historians, and should aim to give a basic understanding of what each visualization is useful for to someone who understands basic line/bar/pie charts.
For each of your assigned chart types, your visualization guide should discuss:
- What kind of data does this chart display well?
- What kind of data is NOT suitable for this type of chart?
- What kind of relationship or pattern can this chart illustrate? (eg, change over time, relationship between two quantitative measures, relationship between a quantitative and qualitative measure, etc)
Additionally, you should find and discuss an example of your chart type. You may use any of the resources assigned for the class, or other sources like 538, Mike Bostock’s NY Times articles, @nytimesgraphics, @PostGraphics, the Economist’s Graphic Detail blog, The Guardian Interactive, the D3.js example gallery, Flowing Data, Information is Beautiful, The Pudding, r/DataIsBeautiful, r/DataIsUgly, JunkCharts, WTF Visualizations, Include both a link and an attributed image of your example chart in your post.
Your post should be tagged with the “Visualization Guide” category.
Chapters 6-16 of Fundamentals of Data Visualization will be EXTREMELY helpful for you in completing this assignment, as will DataViz Project and The Data Viz Catalogue. Chapter 5 includes a brief guide to several types of charts, and links to more information in the other chapters. Chapter 2 may be useful for describing the kinds of data which is and is not suitable for particular char types.
Choose two chart types from the list below:
- Stacked graph/stream graph
- Small multiples
- Horizon graphs
- Scatter plot/bubble chart
- Chloropleth map
- Symbol map
- Cartogram
- Heatmap
- Node-link diagram/dendogram
- Enclosure diagram/tree map/circle packing
- Force directed network graph
- Arc network diagram
- Matrix plot
- Histogram
- Bar/stacked bar/grouped bar chart
- Area/stacked area chart
- Line/multiple line chart