The art of curation

Ben P. wrote me about his project Global Data Tracker (link), which is a website where one can pull data about countries. In particular, Ben asked me to take a look at the section on forest area. The chart on the right side has the feel of something that came right out of the box. The forest-area series runs from 1990 to 2023, and yet the time axis stretches back to 1960, consigning half of the plot area to empty space. The horizontal gridlines find themselves at awkward levels such as 33.01.There is also little sense in starting the axis at zero, given that the attained values are far from zero, and the data series moves slowly.Here is the chart for urban population, for which the data series stretches back to 1960, and the space is fully filled:I'm guessing that the design decisions are being set not at the individual chart's level but across a group of charts. Things then got a lot more interesting. Ben posted a different visualization on Reddit (link) that is derived from the same…