They provide an anchor in your charts, and you compare everything else against the anchor. Where you set the anchor changes your chart completely.
Results for xkcd
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Adjusting the Point of Reference to Highlight Different Aspects of the Data (The Process #49)
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Setting Visualization Expectations to Avoid Audience Confusion (The Process #41)
People misinterpret charts all of the time, because they go in with the wrong expectations before they even fully interpret what a chart is about.
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Axis Labels, Better Than Defaults (The Process #38)
In this guide, I look maybe a little too closely at how to adjust axis labels for more readable charts.
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Cohort and age effects
I’m just gonna put this xkcd comic right here.…
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Population mountains
You’ve seen the maps of population density. You’ve seen the jokes. But you…
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Election Visualization Circle of Life
Election night has become quite the event for newsrooms and graphics departments over the years, and the visualization production cycle has started to feel more familiar each time.
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Visualization Away from the Computer, Developing Ideas, Bring in the Constraints
Made-by-hand visualization has been making a mini comeback as of late, and it’s been fun to see what people do with data away from the computer.
Of course, we don’t have the time to draw every chart and map by hand, but there are some parts of the practice we can use in our own work.
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Visualizing Outliers
Step 1: Figure out why the outlier exists in the first place. Step 2: Choose from these visualization options to show the outlier.
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How to Spot Visualization Lies
Many charts don’t tell the truth. This is a simple guide to spotting them.
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Best Data Visualization Projects of 2016
Here are my favorites for the year.
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Missing 11th of the month
David Hagan looked closer at why the 11th of the month appeared to…
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Timelines show Star Wars character interactions
Remember when xkcd charted character interactions for fictional stories? Inspired by that and…
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Turn a two-way mirror into an information display
Here’s a fun project to try over the weekend. Hannah Mitt and Andrew…
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Map of global carbon emissions
Using data from the Earth System Research Laboratory of the National Oceanic and…
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Interracial and same-sex marriage parallels
xkcd doing what xkcd does. Randall Munroe charts a brief timeline of interracial…
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How to Make Smoothed Density Maps in R
Too many points to plot often means obscured patterns in the clutter. Density maps offer a smooth alternative.
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Infographic satire
SMBC pokes fun at big “informational” graphics with a self-referencing graphic that displays…
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Data Gift Guide
Now that we’re done giving thanks for all the intangibles like love, friends,…
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Color names plotted against gender
A couple of years ago, xkcd ran a survey that asked people to…
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Physics as a geographic map
The fictional map of physics by Bernard H. Porter in 1939 reads:
Containing…