Line Plots are Plot Lines | A data visualization spoken word cover of funfun.email #12)

💛💌This video is a spoken word spinoff inspired by issue #12 of https://funfun.email, a weekly chronicle by MPJ that is vaguely about data, do subscribe if you like it. It is common for us to be touched by stories. Rarely are we touched by digits. But digits can be turned to line plots and line plots can express a plot line. Have you ever attended a spellbinding budget meeting? I have. It was at a meditation center board meeting. I have been in many budget meetings in my life and they are usually dominated by tables of numbers, profit and loss statements, revenue at the end of this quarter or that, and I also expect the audience to covertly simulate not zoning out. This meeting was different. The treasurer enthralled the audience. I could Iconoclastically eschewing tables of digits and instead presented the metrics as time series, plotted on a line, line plots, plot lines, telling the story of how donations flowed to the center every year, more in the summers, and how liquidity increased after the summer due to a loan taken, and how that liquidity was spent buying materials for the construction of a new meditation hall. Line plots can captivate! To survive and thrive, we must collaborate, and to collaborate we need truth and clarity. But our world suffers a deficiency of quality truth. Instead of speaking data, we shout pluralities of anecdotes. An anecdote is one point told as a story, and thus anecdotes enjoy the privilege, the prerogative, the endowment of story. So anecdotes ascended to authority dominating data dubiously, disproportionately. How could a nuanced neutral numerical narrative possibly compete with fiery fables of feasting cats and dogs? The digital revolution is new. We only needed to start digit-izing when we invented pottery, merely 12,000 years ago. In contrast, we've had stories for millions of years. Stories are primeval, primordial, visceral, natural. Pottery may be new technology, but lines are not. Developmental psychology studies