Back in the old days, when I was a grammar Nazi, there were a few phrases that really annoyed me. One was “giving 110%” (okay, that one still irks me) another, thanks to B, was “I’ll try and…” (hmm, ditto) and still another was “The score doesn’t reflect how close it was.”

On that last, I used to always have the same mental response: oh really? Then what does it reflect? That all changed once I started going to basketball games, where I had the chance to feel the wrenching agony and soaring joy that came with each minute of a hard-fought contest.

So that got me thinking: what would better encapsulate a close game? I reject box scores as not “scannable” enough. Ultimately I thought some sort of bar graph, with bars above and below the axis showing points scored. A tight grouping of high bars at the end could show a rally, a relatively consistent spacing and height of bars would show if one team was consistent.

A few days ago, I learned that these very things exist. They’re called “sparklines”, and they look something like this: (a baseball season.) Sparklines are “intense, simple, word-sized graphics” according to Edward R. Tufte in his book Beautiful Evidence. (I believe it’s still forthcoming, as it’s not in Amazon. I can recommend The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Visual Explanations though, if you’re a bit of a graphics/stats geek.) The goal here is to convey information in a tight little space, and the sample chapter linked above Tufte breaks out examples for everything from medical charts to how planets look.

I don’t expect sparklines to show up in the sports pages anytime soon, but I think it would be fun if they did.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 15th, 2005 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Geekery.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.