FUNNY GRAPHS: Indexed, Graph Jam & The New Pie Chart?

[Ryan Goble]

I'd say these are brilliant mixes of the qualitative and quantitative :)

Some folks from my old school in the Bronx, Karl Boyno and Nic Vitale hipped me to these hysterical collections of graphs. Some are suitable for funny teaching some are best left in the adult world. They all nicely illustrate the power of graphs to communicate ideas and funny ones at that - I imagine the PG graphs would help kids wrap their heads around these big ideas.

First from a blog of a woman named Jessica Hagy. She's got hundreds.
Indexed.blogspot.com

Then most of you probably know about GraphJam where they do Music and Pop Culture Graphs. They even have a book Graph Out Loud: Music. Movies. Graphs. Awesome.that collects their work.

Then, on a not as funny note - Seed Magazine had an article about why we must "get past the pie chart"...

It wasn’t immediately popular, but the pie chart, as it was later called, gave visual metaphor to a concept that numbers had difficulty conveying. It became the default means of collating and displaying data pictorially. Unfortunately, these days few people know which types of data are appropriate for the chart, or even for visualizing at all. The pie chart is intended to display proportions of a whole within a single, small data set, but overzealous Excel users dump in large data sets or stack multiple pies. The resulting complex defeats the purpose of using a picture: simplification. The charting features of Excel, which has had its share of critics — see Edward Tufte’s scathing essay on its flaws — were only the beginning.

Full article here.