Before reading the article:
How comfortable are you with reading graphs, including charts, maps and histograms? Have you ever found graphs to be useful or meaningful to your life? Are you ever confused or intimidated by them? What strategies do you use to read, interpret and evaluate them?
The Upshot is a section of The New York Times that often features graphs, and it recently celebrated its fifth birthday. To mark the occasion, The Upshot published many of its favorite, most-read and most distinctive work since 2014.
To get a better sense of what this graph-rich section is all about, set a stopwatch for five minutes and scroll through “The Upshot, Five Years In” until the timer goes off. Click on at least three articles and scan the graphs and visualizations.
Afterward, answer the following:
• How would you describe The Upshot in one or two sentences to someone who has never visited this Times section before?
• What kinds of subject matter and issues does it explore?
• What are some of the ways that the section visualizes data?
• Which story in the list was most visually appealing to you and why?
Next, choose one article included in “The Upshot, Five Years In,” but make sure it includes at least one graph. (Most of the articles include a graph, but a few do not.) Read the article, look closely at one of the graphs in the article and answer the following questions:
1. Why did you select the article you did? What did you find interesting about the headline or topic?
2. What do you notice in the graph you selected?
3. What do you wonder? What are you curious about that comes from what you notice in the graph?
4. What story does the graph tell? Write a catchy headline that captures its main idea. If your headline makes a claim, tell us what you noticed that supports your claim.
5. How does the text accompanying the graph add to your understanding of the subject matter?
6. What did you learn from the article as a whole? What was most interesting, surprising, provocative to you?
7. Try to assess the graph with a critical eye. Does the graph help communicate the ideas presented in the article? How clear and effective is the graph? Is there anything What information missing from the graph that might be helpful? Can you imagine alternative ways the data in the graph might be visualized? Explain.
Finally, tell us more about what you think:
— How important is graph literacy? Is it taught in your school? Where do you see graphs in your everyday life?
— Assess your graph literacy: In your opinion, do you have the tools and strategies to understand graphs, evaluate their reliability and draw logical conclusions? What are your strengths and weaknesses?
— How likely are you to read The Upshot in the future? What data or question would you like to see The Upshot explore? Why and how do you feel you would gain insight from a visual or graphical approach?
— If you want to analyze more graphs, then visit our “What’s Going On in This Graph?” archive, which borrows heavily from The Upshot. You can pick any one of the graphs we highlight, and answer the same questions you responded to above.
Further Resources:
Teach About Climate Change With These 24 New York Times Graphs