Just recently, I came across this representation of the (global) temperature rise over the period 1850-2020, made by Professor Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading. It is powerful, artsy, reminding me of the Everything mural in the Zeeman Building at the University of Warwick, and visually most appealing, as a poster about the urgency for action, but it nonetheless remain a poor statistical graph in that it is a 2d presentation of a 1d dataset, the time series of the yearly average temperatures, missing the opportunity to exploit the second axis by eg taking a stripe of the Earth from South Pole to North Pole or the daily temperature throughout the year. And it is also lacking a scale, not only by omitting the dates on the first axis, but also by choosing an arbitrary if dramatic colour range [unable to incorporate the so-far ultimate 2023?!] (And with the visual appeal comes the danger of turning it into yet another marketing gimmick, hence cancelling its message.)
Archive for data graphics
warming stripes [but 1d]
Posted in Kids, pictures, Statistics, Travel with tags art, climate change, data graphics, Ed Hawkins, extreme temperatures, fresque, heating, Ian Davenport, Little Ice Age, University of Reading, University of Warwick, Zeeman building on April 15, 2024 by xi'anmax spacing between mass shootings [data graphics]
Posted in Books, R, Statistics with tags beta distribution, data analysis, data graphics, data journalism, Le Monde, Maine, mass shooting, maximum spacing, US politics, USA on January 11, 2024 by xi'an
missing dimensions
Posted in Statistics with tags 12 Angry Men, data graphics, data visualisation, dimension reduction, Edward Tufte, J.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, Minard, Napoléon Bonaparte, Russian campaign, Russian winter, Sidney Lumet, Star Wars, xkcd on February 14, 2021 by xi'an
Xi'an's Og 