Topic
Data visualization lessons
A chart is an argument about which comparison matters. Pick bars and you have claimed the quantities are worth comparing directly; pick a pie and you have claimed they are parts of something whole.
These clips take real figures and show what happens when the encoding changes: the same data as bars and as a pie, the same trend with the axis cropped and with it honest. The lesson is usually that the chart, not the data, was doing the persuading.
- Videos
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Every clip here states its source and the period it covers, and carries the underlying numbers on its page as a table you can copy.
What you'll learn
What this topic covers
- Why bars beat pies for almost every comparison, and the narrow case where pies still win
- What a truncated y-axis does to a trend, and when cropping is legitimate
- When a log scale clarifies and when it hides the thing you should be alarmed about
- Why stacked bars only let you compare the bottom segment
- How colour scales invent patterns that are not in the data
Videos
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