This issue came up in a class I taught this Fall. The text book we used condemned the use of broken axis graphs. However, one of my students made a convincing case that, under some circumstances, you might be more interested in the fluctuations highlighted by the broken axis graphs, and, thus, justified in using them.
On Friday, I read a Natalie Kitroeff Businessweek.com story on the declining appeal of law school, and was so struck by this chart that I shared it on Twitter:
The chart tells a dramatic story: all the gains in law school enrollment since the mid-1970s have been wiped out in just three years. Twitter responded to that drama with lots of retweets and favorites — but also with lots of disapproving remarks like this:
@foxjust@DanielPink That’s possibly the one of the worst represented charts I’ve ever seen.
— Nate Kettles (@NateKettles) December 12, 2014
And this:
.@foxjust graphs that don’t go to zero are a thought crime. /cc @codinghorror
— mason bryant (@mason_bryant) December 12, 2014
There were many, many more responses like that. A couple of them wielded the name of Edward Tufte, today’s leading authority on the visual presentation of data. Which is interesting, because after about five seconds of Googling I found
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