Same graph, different narratives

People who make data visualizations often talk about “storytelling with data visualizations.” This is something that I think can be hard for people to wrap their heads around. Let me try an example.

Here is a run of the mill scatterplot.

There are at least four different points you can make with that data. Probably more, but I’m just going to limit myself to the obvious ones.

First, you might be most interesting in communicating the trend.

But it’s also possible that you want to make people aware of the variation. In that case you would want to remove or minimized the trendline. If this was a timeline or other continuous record, you might join the dots.

Or it might be that the key point of the graph is even more focused on a small number of data points. In many cases, the most extreme data points are of interest.

Low extremes can also be interesting, and annotations help contextualize what the value means.

A graph is always intended to persuade, so why not make it easier for a viewer to see the same thing you see?

P.S.—If the graph looks familiar, it’s because it’s the first in Anscomb’s quartet.