Uploaded February 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
💛💌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 show that young children understand time or progression when they are presented with a timeline or a path of dots. Why is that? Perhaps lines even predate stories. One can imagine communication, prior to spoken language, our ancestors pointing and drawing lines in the sand, to plan hunting, making maps.
Line plot or plot line, both come from the old English plot, meaning a small piece of land and by the 16th century, the age of Shakespeare, the word evolved to describe a plan or scheme, a mapping of events in a narrative guiding audiences through a structured sequence.
When we plot a story or a time series, we are mapping meaning onto time or space, showing relationships and progressions. Just as land plots are markers of territory, story plots chart emotional landscapes. Each plot point is a landmark in the journey across the terrain, whether that terrain is land, the psyche, server uptime or a budget.
We turn numbers into lines, digits into paths, snapshots into flowing time, plotting lines so that we also viscerally understand, not merely our System 2.
💛💌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 show that young children understand time or progression when they are presented with a timeline or a path of dots. Why is that? Perhaps lines even predate stories. One can imagine communication, prior to spoken language, our ancestors pointing and drawing lines in the sand, to plan hunting, making maps.
Line plot or plot line, both come from the old English plot, meaning a small piece of land and by the 16th century, the age of Shakespeare, the word evolved to describe a plan or scheme, a mapping of events in a narrative guiding audiences through a structured sequence.
When we plot a story or a time series, we are mapping meaning onto time or space, showing relationships and progressions. Just as land plots are markers of territory, story plots chart emotional landscapes. Each plot point is a landmark in the journey across the terrain, whether that terrain is land, the psyche, server uptime or a budget.
We turn numbers into lines, digits into paths, snapshots into flowing time, plotting lines so that we also viscerally understand, not merely our System 2.
