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Charts are a window into the world. When done right, we gain an understanding of who we are, where we are, and how we can become better versions of ourselves. However, when done wrong, in the absence of truth, charts can be harmful.
This is a guide to protect ourselves and to preserve what is good about turning data into visual things.
We start with chart anatomy; then we look at how small changes can shift a point of view; this takes us to misleading chart varieties; and we finish with reading data and next steps.
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After a gulf rename, I got to browsing some historical maps. Jacques Nicolas Bellin drew this map in 1765.
This is not the first mention for the Gulf of Mexico though. That belongs to a map from 1550, according to Paul Galtsoff’s article (1954) for Fish and Wildlife Service:
Cortes, in his despatches, referred to the Gulf as Mar del Norte, while the names Golfo de Florida and Golfo de Cortes are found in the writings of other explorers. The name Sinus Magnus Antilliarum appears on an old Portuguese map made in 1558 by Diego Homen (original in British Museum). Probably the most remarkable name is that of Mare Cathaynum (Chinese Sea) which is found on one chart of the middle of the sixteenth century (copy reproduced in the Memoirs de la Societe de Nancy, 1832). In 1550 the name Golfo de Mexico appears for the first time on the world map the original of which, according to Kohl, is in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Earlier Spanish geographers used, also, the name of Golfo de Nueva Espana. Herrera (1728) called it Ensenada Mexicana and Seno Mexicano, the names which persisted in Spanish admiralty charts until the eighteenth century. The present name, the Gulf of Mexico, and the corresponding names, Golphe du Mexique in French and Golfo Mexicano in Spanish, appear to have been in use since the middle of the seventeenth century.
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Cartoonist Becky Barnicoat illustrates the passing of time over a year. Seems right:
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While government data remains in limbo, for Slate, Lizzie O’Leary highlights the sectors that rely on public resources (all of them):
Government data is certainly not perfect, true. But the private sector relies heavily on government information. Economists Ellen Hughes-Cromwick and Julia Coronado wrote a 2019 paper published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives showing how a vast range of companies depend on U.S. government data to understand their customers and make decisions about how to run their businesses.
Let’s say that you run, oh, I don’t know, an electric car company. According to Hughes-Cromwick and Coronado’s work, you might use government reports on auto sales (the Bureau of Economic Analysis), consumer credit (the Fed), the consumer price index for new vehicles (BLS), the consumer price index for all items (BLS), disposable personal income (BEA), employment and unemployment (BLS), energy prices (BLS and the Energy Information Administration), the GDP (BEA), interest rates (the Fed), inventories (the census), regional income, prices, and consumer spending (BEA and the census). And that’s just for short-term decisionmaking purposes!
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The “Department of Government Efficiency” wants to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. For The Washington Post, Luis Melgar, Emma Kumer, and Jeff Stein use a quiz-like graphic to show why such a cut is a lofty task. Choose what to cut and see if you can reach the target amount.
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You can use the Internet Archive to access historical versions, but GovWayback makes it even more straightforward:
GovWayback is a simple tool to quickly access archived versions of government websites from before January 20, 2025 – just add “wayback.com” after “.gov” in any government URL. GovWayback automatically redirects you to that page’s archived version from the Internet Archive.
For example, you can enter cdc.govwayback.com, and it’ll take you the archived version of cdc.gov.
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The Gulf of Mexico has been renamed to the Gulf of America in the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) by the U.S. Geological Survey. When you search for the gulf on USGS, you get the following result that defaults to Gulf of America.
Only the main title changed though. “Research in the Gulf of Mexico” appears underneath and if you follow the link, Mexico is the point of reference.
But now, when you search Google Maps, which follows the naming defined by the GNIS, you get the Gulf of America, as shown above. As of the evening of February 10, 2025, Apple Maps still shows the Gulf of Mexico:
It’s shocking how quickly the names can change in the system. The GNIS started in the 1970s. How many times have geographic areas and features changed over the years? Is there a space that has been renamed many times?
In the U.S., the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has officially updated “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America.” As we announced two weeks ago and consistent with our longstanding practices, we’ve begun rolling out changes to reflect this update. People using Maps in the U.S. will see “Gulf of America,” and people in Mexico will see “Gulf of Mexico.” Everyone else will see both names.
I honestly thought this was a joke.
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I missed this one last week, pre-Super Bowl, but for The Washington Post, Artur Galocha highlighted self-censoring during the Super Bowl halftime show to comply with FCC regulations. It seems Kendrick Lamar was still able to get his point across with lyric substitutions.
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Hank Azaria, who does the voices for many characters on The Simpsons, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times on craftsmanship and AI:
If A.I. tries to recreate one of my voices, what will the lack of humanness sound like? How big will the difference be? I honestly don’t know, but I think it will be enough, at least in the near term, that we’ll notice something is off, in the same way that we notice something’s amiss in a subpar film or TV show. When the exposition is clunky or there’s a bad bit of dialogue or a character says something that’s out of character — why would he say that if he was afraid? Why did she just announce her back story like that? Et cetera.
It adds up to a sense that what we’re watching isn’t real, and you don’t need to pay attention to it. Believability is earned through craftsmanship, with good storytelling and good performances, good cinematography and good directing and a good script and good music.
I hope he’s right, for all of our sakes.
For data analysis and visualization specifically, it’s getting easier to plug in data and get output that looks useful, but a closer look often shows something is off. Although you might not know it if you don’t work with data regularly. Quality control will be vital.
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Messing with how emojis are encoded, Paul Butler demonstrates how one might hide data via a smiley:
Most unicode characters do not have variations associated with them. Since unicode is an evolving standard and aims to be future-compatible, variation selectors are supposed to be preserved during transformations, even if their meaning is not known by the code handling them. So the codepoint
U+0067
(“g”) followed byU+FE01
(VS-2) renders as a lowercase “g”, exactly the same asU+0067
alone. But if you copy and paste it, the variation selector will tag along with it.Since 256 is exactly enough variations to represent a single byte, this gives us a way to “hide” one byte of data in any other unicode codepoint.
Use this simple tool to give it a whirl 😀󠄼󠅟󠅞󠅗󠄐󠅜󠅙󠅦󠅕󠄐󠅤󠅘󠅕󠄐󠅔󠅑󠅤󠅑󠄐󠅠󠅟󠅙󠅞󠅤󠄞.
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To contain the fires in Los Angeles, aircraft flew back and forth to drop retardant and survey the area for several days. Peter Atwood used an animated map to show 24 hours of activity, totaling over 15,000 flight miles.
Atwood used wildfire data from NASA, the ArcGIS Living Atlas for terrain, and FlightAware data for the flights. The neon aesthetic highlights the patterns and urgency of each aircraft’s travels.
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According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, about 65,000 federal workers have taken the resignation offer. The New York Times puts that number into context, given the size of the federal workforce.
In other words, the federal government is an enormous work force that already experiences sizable turnover every year. In addition to workers who leave the government to retire or simply to quit, about another 50,000 to 60,000 are terminated every year for disciplinary or performance reasons, or because their appointments or funds expired. A small number — around 3,400 — die each year while employed by the government. All these departures are typically replaced by about 240,000 hires each year.
While the resignation count might seem large, the denominator is a lot bigger.
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The Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab is archiving Data.gov and making the data easy to download. So far, they have a collection of 311,000 datasets:
This is the first release in our new data vault project to preserve and authenticate vital public datasets for academic research, policymaking, and public use.
We’ve built this project on our long-standing commitment to preserving government records and making public information available to everyone. Libraries play an essential role in safeguarding the integrity of digital information. By preserving detailed metadata and establishing digital signatures for authenticity and provenance, we make it easier for researchers and the public to cite and access the information they need over time.
You can download the daily archive here.
They also open sourced the software for others to build similar collections. Great.
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About 1 in 10 people use the same four-digit PIN, based on an analysis of Have I Been Pwned? data by Julian Fell and Teresa Tan for ABC News:
Even though there are 10,000 possible combinations, when humans get involved that equation changes dramatically.
If someone wants to unlock a stolen phone – or retrieve money from an ATM – and only have five guesses, this data suggests they still have a one-in-eight chance of guessing correctly.
The scroll through the heatmap of PIN numbers, which shows the first two digits on the vertical axis and the last two digits on the horizontal, drives the point home. Maybe stay away from the diagonal and horizontal lines.
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The Hamilton Project is tracking federal expenditures and updating daily:
This data interactive shows actual daily and weekly processed outlays to key programs and departments, as well as to states, Congress, and the Judiciary. This tool only reports outlays of federal funds, meaning the actual transmission of funds from the federal government to another entity. This tool, therefore, allows users to track federal government spending in real time.
The data comes from the Daily Treasury Statement from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, so it’s anyone’s guess how long that will last. But for now, you can see where money is going in near real-time.
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The data portal for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was taken down last Friday. For now, it seems data.cdc.gov is up in a modified form, but just in case, the Internet Archive has all the data that was available prior to January 28, 2025.
The compressed data file is only 95 gigabytes, so maybe just download it now.
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As of this evening on February 4, 2025, the TIGER/Line shapefiles, which provide legal boundaries at various geographic levels, are currently unavailable on the Census website. The site is there, but when you try to download something via the menus, you get a box of nothing.
Actually, poking around more, it seems that any Census web interface that relies on downloads via FTP gets you a 403 error. Data.census.gov is still up.
In the meantime, IPUMS, which has worked with national agencies over the past couple decades, still has microdata. They sent this email earlier today:
As you may already be aware, on Friday, January 31, federal agencies removed public data and documentation previously made available via public-facing federal government websites in response to administration directives. The types of data removed include large-scale population data sources that provide vital insight into the health and wellbeing of all communities.
We are writing to reassure you that IPUMS data remain available, and that IPUMS remains committed to preserving and democratizing access to the world’s population data.
We are monitoring this evolving situation closely. As part of our standard procedures, we download and preserve original data from U.S. statistical agencies that serve as the source data for IPUMS. Since last Friday, several organizations (and individuals) have downloaded many other public federal datasets. There are efforts underway to catalog and make these data available. We will share resources and guidance when we have it about how to locate or share missing data.
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Data Beads, by Eszter Katona and Mihály Minkó, is a fun initiative that encourages people to make and wear bracelets based on data:
This is a grassroots initiative that’s all about brining data visualization into a whole new space—off the screen and into wearable, everyday objects. We turn data into simple, easy-to-make bracelets, making data more approachable and fun.
These bracelets aren’t just accessories: they’re conversation starters that help break the ice around different topics, data and graphs, which can be difficult for many people to engage with. At the same time, we hope they spark curiosity and improve data literacy in a casual, creative way.
I suddenly wish the short-lived Shirt Project was still going.