GraphJam Side A · Music & pop culture in charts
The Plate Archive21 charts

Cats and Other Animals, in Charts

The house pet as a measurable system, drawn by people who lived with one.

Twenty-one charts, and the collection has a clear centre of gravity: the domestic animal treated as a system with inputs and outputs. That framing is why the good entries here are better than the subject suggests. A chart about a pet is a chart about a creature whose behaviour you have observed daily for years without ever writing any of it down.

The cat charts

Things That Attract My Cat’s Attention is the model: a ranked list with the categories in the wrong order, which is the finding. Awesomeness of Cats is a single value asserted without evidence. Cat Biting Preferences is a distribution. When my cat sleeps on me and Where my cat sits expecting pet are both about position over time. How My Cat Reacts to… is a response table. Feline Dietary Preferences is the one that any owner would dispute in detail while agreeing with in substance.

Seven charts, all drawn independently, all reaching the same conclusion by different routes. That consistency is more interesting than any one of them: it is a crowd-sourced description of an animal, produced by people who did not know they were collaborating.

Dogs, and the rising line

Happiness of your Dog vs. How long you’ve been gone. is the best chart in the collection and possibly the most efficient in the archive. Two axes, one line, and a steady climb from just looks at you at five minutes to knocks you over in excitement at an hour. Every dog owner reads it instantly, and the joke is entirely carried by the geometry, which is the argument this whole site was accidentally making.

The world as my dachshund sees it is linked from two sites, and does the opposite: it takes the animal’s point of view rather than measuring it from outside.

The research-question charts

Three entries here are funny because they are phrased like papers. Probability of waterfowl running around in circles by species names a population, a behaviour and a comparison across species. Comparison of Headwear Worn by Gnomes by % uses the notation of a real survey on a population that does not exist. Cuteness vs. Number of Legs proposes a single explanatory variable for an aesthetic judgement, which is exactly what a bad paper does.

People Who Hate Snakes And The Intesity of the Hate belongs with them, two dimensions, a spelling error in the title, and a finding nobody would challenge.

The strays

Not everything here is a pet or a survey. It’s A Horse! is a chart about recognition. Bird name mentioned vs smuttiness of ensuing banter is linked from two sites and is really about conversation rather than birds. Pig Distribution is a distribution of pigs. Beware of Ninjas, from September 2010, is filed here because of what it is guarding against rather than what it is, and Lonely black sheep of the, the last entry, with the image lost and the title truncated by whatever linked to it, is the archive’s own final animal chart, left mid-sentence.

Charts here
21
Images recovered
11
Published as plates
1
Referring domains
25
First posted
Apr 2008
Last posted
Oct 2010

The charts

In publication order. Sides run in tens, the way a record does. A chart marked as a plate has its own page and its own retrospective; the rest are published here, at the addresses they held when they were posted.

  1. A1

    Probability of waterfowl running around in circles by species

    · Drawn by Daniel Pewewardy

  2. A2

    Cat Biting Preferences

    · Drawn by Katterli · image not recovered

  3. A3

    Pig Distribution

    · Drawn by Ian P

  4. A4

    Bird name mentioned vs smuttiness of ensuing banter

    · Drawn by Bloobeard · 2 domains still link here

  5. A5

    Comparison of Headwear Worn by Gnomes by %

    · Drawn by Luke Y

  6. A6

    Awesomeness of Cats

    · Drawn by Gellman

  7. A7

    People Who Hate Snakes And The Intesity of the Hate

    · Drawn by Alex M

  8. A8

    When my cat sleeps on me

    · Drawn by ArkX · image not recovered

  9. A9

    Things That Attract My Cat’s Attention

    · Drawn by Artscrafter

  10. A10

    It’s A Horse!

    · Drawn by CalmDog

  11. Side B
  12. B1

    Happiness of your Dog vs. How long you’ve been gone.

  13. B2

    The world as my dachshund sees it

    · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  14. B3

    Animal abuse in peta’s view

    · Drawn by MitchZer0 · 3 domains still link here · published as a plate

  15. B4

    Feline Dietary Preferences

    · Drawn by cflwarrior · image not recovered

  16. B5

    How My Cat Reacts to…

    · Drawn by Larii · image not recovered

  17. B6

    Cuteness vs. Number of Legs

    · Drawn by pirhomaniak · image not recovered

  18. B7

    Usefulness of Patio Umbrella

    · image not recovered

  19. B8

    Where my cat sits expecting pet

    · image not recovered

  20. B9

    Pet Peeves List: Congratulations, You’re On It!

    · Drawn by kcgrassm · image not recovered

  21. B10

    Beware of Ninjas

    · Drawn by Bloodstock

  22. Side C
  23. C1

    Lonely black sheep of the

    · image not recovered

Queries answered

Why are there so many cat charts?

Because the original site was part of a network built on cat pictures, and its audience arrived with the habit. Seven of the twenty-one entries here are about cats specifically, drawn between May 2008 and August 2010.

Which animal chart is the best constructed?

Happiness of your Dog vs. How long you’ve been gone., from June 2009. It plots a line climbing steadily from the mildest greeting to the most extreme one as the absence lengthens, which is the correct shape and the entire joke, and it needs no caption to land.

Is the PETA chart in this collection?

Animal abuse in peta’s view, from October 2009, is here and is published as its own plate. A second chart about the organisation sits in the Politics collection, because its subject is the campaigning rather than the animals.

What is the waterfowl chart?

Probability of waterfowl running around in circles by species, from April 2008, one of the earliest entries in the whole archive, and a chart that states a research question more precisely than most real papers do.

Why do some entries have no image?

Every original chart image was hosted on a service that no longer serves them, so a surviving copy had to be found for each one. Where none survived, the entry keeps its title, date and address rather than a substitute image.