Uncertainty

Content for Monday, February 17, 2025–Friday, February 21, 2025

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
• Nick Desbarats, “I’ve Stopped Using Box Plots. Should You?”
• Communicating Uncertainty When Lives Are on the Line
• Cédric Scherer, “Visualizing distributions with raincloud plots with ggplot2”

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.

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Tip

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.

• Introduction
• Communicating uncertainty
• Visualizing uncertainty

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:

References

Cairo, Alberto. 2016. The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication. Berkeley, California: New Riders.

Wilke, Claus E. 2018. Fundamentals of Data Visualization. Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly Media. https://clauswilke.com/dataviz/.