Although I was also very interested in Tufte’s second and third rules, I chose Tufte’s first rule to examine here. This rule states that “pure, bright or very strong colors have loud, unbearable effects when they stand unrelieved over large areas adjacent to each other, but extraordinary effects can be achieved when they are used sparingly on or between dull background tones.”

In my example, I extracted a dataset from Reddit of posts referencing different locations in and around Ukraine (e.g., Kyiv) during the two weeks prior and following the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict of 2022 (Feb 12 - Mar 12, 2022).

viz (3).png This first image shows a bump chart distribution examining total upvotes on Reddit posts whose titles referenced any of 12 wartime locations (e.g., Kyiv) over the course of 4 weeks. The distribution shows upvotes from different subreddits where relevant content was extracted. In this example, the bump chart is shown in an “expanded” view in which distributions are stretched to fill available vertical space, creating massive and interlocking structures of interweaving strings that represent changes in upvote volume over time for each subreddit.

viz (2).png In this example, the same data is used, but rather than visualizing it in vetical expansion, no vertical alignment modifications are made. This allows the data to be seen much more clearly, and enables viewers to see which dates in fact were most relevant in the selected data.

In both cases, I applied a 5-point whitespace between streams (subreddits) to allow viewers to more easily distinguish between the differing streams. But in the first example, this whitespace does not appear to improve our ability to interpret the visualization.