About the Annual

GraphJam is published as an annual: a numbered run of plates, each one a chart, bound into sections. The form is borrowed from the printed statistical yearbooks that governments and trade bodies used to issue every year, which is a deliberately over-serious frame for material that is often not serious at all.

Charts recovered

652

Published as plates

48

Sites still linking

980

Span

2008–2010

The archive

Between 2008 and 2010 the site ran on reader submissions. People made charts about music, work, the internet and their own irritations, and the good ones were published with a credit. Several thousand accumulated, and a number of them travelled a long way from here: national newspapers, technology press, university course pages, and in a handful of cases Wikipedia.

Those pages later stopped resolving. Restoring them is most of the work behind this edition, and the restoration rules are narrow on purpose:

• the chart image is the one that was published, not a redrawn version;
• the title is the one that ran, including the naming conventions of the time;
• the contributor credit is printed wherever the original page recorded one;
• nothing is invented to fill a gap. A plate whose image could not be recovered is not published with a substitute.

Charts that attracted sustained attention are restored to their own page at the address they always had. The rest are collected into themed sections, where each plate keeps its own anchor so a link to a specific chart still lands on that chart.

The newer sections

The odds and return-to-player sections are new writing rather than recovered material. They exist because the arithmetic of casino games is a genuinely chart-shaped subject that is almost always explained in paragraphs instead.

Those pages follow three rules. Figures are stated with their basis, so a house edge or a return percentage says which rules or which market it assumes. Nothing is presented as a recommendation: there are no operator ratings and no bonus offers in the editorial text. The one paid banner on the site sits in the home page sidebar and is labelled as an advertisement. And where a chart could be made to look more dramatic by truncating an axis, it is not.

Corrections

A wrong number in a chart is worse than a wrong number in a sentence, because a chart is believed faster. Every figure on the gambling pages therefore states its basis on the page itself, so a reader can check it against the source rather than take it on trust.