The Plate Archive Section III

The GraphJam Chart Archive: The Recovered Plates and Charts, 2008 to 2010

Section III of the annual. Six hundred and fifty-two recovered charts, plotted against the record of who still points at them.

The GraphJam chart archive covers March 2008 to October 2010, the period in which GraphJam published charts drawn by its readers. Not infographics and not data journalism: pie charts about breakfast, Venn diagrams about operating systems, bar charts whose x-axis was two consecutive days in June. This chart archive is what survives of that, and the plate below is the first honest picture of the GraphJam archive that has ever been drawn, because it plots the collection against the one thing nobody publishes about their own site: who is still pointing at it.

Plate I

Every archived chart, plotted by publication date against the number of distinct domains that still link to it. Filled green: the 48 charts linked from three or more sites and whose image was recovered, published here as individual plates. Filled violet: chart recovered, fewer links. Hollow, grey outline: the chart itself is lost, and only its title and date survive. Source: referring-domain counts for 659 archived addresses, spam filtered, 2008-03-02 to 2010-10-19.

What the recovered charts in the GraphJam chart archive are, and what they are not

None of these charts are measurements. Almost none have a source, a sample or a defensible axis, and several are actively hostile to the format they borrow. A three-dimensional exploded pie chart of what people use a search engine for is not evidence of anything.

What the GraphJam chart archive is instead is a demonstration that chart formats carry arguments on their own. A pie chart forces every category into one fixed total, so a pie with a single slice at 100% and four at zero makes a claim no sentence makes as efficiently. Nested circles say one set contains another. A bar chart with two adjacent dates and opposite values says a change was instantaneous. The joke, in every case, is carried by the geometry rather than by the caption, and that is why so many of these images travelled into arguments rather than into humour galleries.

The plate above records where they travelled. Each point is one chart, placed by its publication date and by the number of separate domains that still link to it today. The floor of the plot is charts with a single linking site each. The spine rising off it is the small group that escaped: picked up by Mother Jones, by Slate, by Wired, by a Wikipedia editor posting one of them on a talk page, by a Thai technology site covering a European antitrust case.

Song chart memes: the format that gave the site its name

The site began as charts about music, and the earliest posts carry the phrase in the address itself. A song chart meme takes a set of lyrics as its dataset and renders it in a business format: a monthly calendar filled in with the days named in a chorus, a chart of a song’s emotional trajectory, a pie of what a band actually sings about.

That constraint produced the best work in the GraphJam archive, because it forced a real transformation. The lyrics are fixed and public, the chart type is mundane, and the only creative act available is choosing which format makes the familiar thing look absurd. When the format was chosen well the result reads like a corporate slide about something no corporation has ever discussed.

Funny graphs: the second era

By 2009 the slug prefix on new posts had changed, and so had the subject. The funny graphs era widened from music to everything: browsers, elevators, zombie preparedness, philosophy degrees, chain letters, the surface of the earth. The charts got more elaborate and, on the whole, less disciplined. A song chart meme had to respect its source; a funny graph could invent both the categories and the proportions.

The funny graphs archive is the larger of the two by count and the more uneven in quality, and it is where most of the unrecovered images sit, because it ran later and its files were rotated through more hosting changes. What survives of the funny graphs archive is published here on the same terms as everything else.

How the GraphJam chart archive is organised

The GraphJam chart archive runs in two tiers, and the plate above explains the split.

Charts linked from three or more sites, whose image was recovered, are published individually as plates at their original dated addresses. Those are the rust-filled points, and they are listed in full below. Each one gets a real retrospective: what it plots, why the format works, and the specific places it was cited.

Everything else sits in twenty-one themed collections, grouped by subject rather than by date and ranging from thirteen charts to sixty-five. Each chart has its own place in one of them, so an address from 2009 still arrives at the chart it named rather than at a general index.

The GraphJam archive is deliberately not a gallery. Charts are not presented as a scrolling wall of images, because the reason each one is here is specific and worth stating, and because a wall of 2009 pie charts is exactly the kind of page nobody reads twice. A chart archive earns its keep by saying why each item is in it, which is the one thing a grid of thumbnails cannot do.

The themed collections

Every chart that is not published as its own plate lives in one of these 21 collections, grouped by subject rather than by date, each with its own account of what that subject looked like when charted by readers between 2008 and 2010.

The plates, in publication order

48 charts are published individually, at the addresses they held in 2008, 2009 and 2010. The figure on the right of each row is the number of distinct domains still linking to it.

Queries answered

What is the GraphJam archive?

A collection of reader-submitted charts published between March 2008 and October 2010, in which pop culture, music and everyday complaint were plotted as pie charts, bar charts and Venn diagrams. They are republished here at the addresses they originally held.

What is a song chart meme?

The site’s founding format: a chart whose data is a song. A calendar filled with the days named in a set of lyrics, or a bar chart of a chorus. The name became the slug prefix on hundreds of posts and is still the phrase most people search for.

Why are some charts missing their image?

The original images were hosted on a service that now returns an error for all of them, so each one no longer serves them, and a surviving copy could be found for only about half. Where a chart could not be recovered, its title and date are kept in the record rather than replaced with a placeholder.

Why do the plates keep their original 2008 to 2010 dates?

Because they are the original publication dates and the addresses depend on them. The URL scheme includes the date, and hundreds of external links point at those exact addresses, so changing a date would break the thing the archive exists to preserve.

Who drew these charts?

Readers. Most were made with the era’s browser-based chart builder and credited by first name or handle, which is why so many share the same default palette and the same three chart types. The credit line on each plate is what the original post recorded, and nothing has been added to it.

Can I still submit a chart?

No. The submission queue and the voting page belonged to the original site and are long gone. What is here is an archive of what it published, alongside new charts about the mathematics of gambling.