Uncertainty
Content for Monday, June 17, 2024–Friday, June 21, 2024
Readings
- Chapter 7 in Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Wilke 2018)
- Chapters 4, 7, and 11 in The Truthful Art (Cairo 2016)
- Why It’s So Hard for Us to Visualize Uncertainty
- Philip Bump, “How To Read This Chart”, June 2024
- Amanda Cox’s keynote address at the 2017 OpenVis Conf
- Communicating Uncertainty When Lives Are on the Line
- Showing uncertainty during the live election forecast & Trolling the uncertainty dial
- Cédric Scherer, “Visualizing distributions with raincloud plots with ggplot2”
Possible questions to reflect on
Remember, you don’t need to answer all of these—or even any of them! These are just here to help guide your thinking. Write about whatever you want.
- Why is it important to deal with uncertainty in data?
- What was good or bad about the New York Times’ 2016 live election guage?
- Why is it so hard to visualize uncertainty?
- Why is it so hard to communicate uncertainty to others?
Slides
The slides for this week’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.
Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.
Videos
Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.
You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here: