Uncertainty

Readings

• Chapter 7 in Claus Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization¹
• Chapters 4, 7, and 11 in Alberto Cairo, The Truthful Art²
• Why It’s So Hard for Us to Visualize Uncertainty
• 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”

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.)

• 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 today’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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• Introduction
• Communicating uncertainty
• Visualizing uncertainty

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: