Relationships

Content for Monday, February 24, 2025–Friday, February 28, 2025

Readings

• Chapter 9 in The Truthful Art (Cairo 2016)
• Andrew Heiss, “Marginalia”
• Chapter 12 in Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Wilke 2018)
• Kieran Healy, “Two y-axes”
• Two Alternatives to Using a Second Y-Axis & Illusion of success & Dissecting two axes
• Dual-Scaled Axes in Graphs: Are They Ever the Best Solution? (Few 2008)

Recommended

• “A Study on Dual-Scale Data Charts” (Isenberg et al. 2011)

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.

View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides

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
• The dangers of dual y-axes
• Visualizing correlations
• Visualizing regressions

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.

Few, Stephen. 2008. “Dual-Scaled Axes in Graphs: Are They Ever the Best Solution?” Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter, March. http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/dual-scaled_axes.pdf.

Isenberg, Petra, Anastasia Bezerianos, Pierre Dragicevic, and and Jean-Daniel Fekete. 2011. “A Study on Dual-Scale Data Charts.” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 17 (12): 2469–78. https://doi.org/10.1109/tvcg.2011.160.

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