Time

Content for Monday, July 21, 2025–Friday, July 25, 2025

Readings

Required readings

Foundational principles:

• Chapter 8 in The Truthful Art (Cairo 2016)
• 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time – A Guide

Readings you should glance through as examples

• How To Fix a Toilet (And Other Things We Couldn’t Do Without Search)
• The Nuclear Threat—The Shadow Peace, part 1
• The Fallen of World War II
• What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York (just look at the picture; you don’t need to read this unless you’re really curious about trends in 311 calls)
• A century of ocean shipping animated
• What is seasonal adjustment and why is it used?
• Calculating birthday probabilities with R instead of math

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
• Axis issues
• Visualizing time
• Starting, ending, and decomposing time

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.