GraphJam Side A · Music & pop culture in charts
The Plate Archive25 charts

The House, the Car and the Queue, in Charts

Charts about the parts of a day nobody writes down.

Twenty-five charts about the ordinary parts of a day. This is the collection with the least famous material and, arguably, the most useful, because the charts here are the only record of things too small to be written about: the temperature of a shower, the contents of a cupboard, the length of a wait.

The engineering charts

Fig. 1 Shower Temperature VS Knob Position is the collection’s best work and it announces itself with a figure number. What it plots is real: a mixer tap with almost no usable range, a long flat approach and then a step change. Anybody who has ever adjusted a shower recognises the curve, and no manufacturer has ever published it.

Elevator door close time, published as its own plate, does the same for perceived duration. Estimated Distance Between My Car and the Car in Front of Me According to plots one physical quantity as judged by three different parties, which is a legitimate way to display disagreement and is used here for a joke about tailgating.

Part Of House On Fire and Reasons for Replacing my Roof are both charts about a building failing, drawn with the calm of a survey report.

Inventories

A second group simply counts what is in a space. THINGS YOU FIND IN A CLOSET is a frequency table. Contents of a living room and What’s In The Living room of a house with a toddler are the same chart drawn from two life stages, and putting them side by side does more work than either alone. Skymall Merchandise Breakdown inventories a catalogue that existed only at altitude.

Benefits of Living Alone is the collection’s most cheerful entry and the only one that plots an advantage rather than a hazard.

Waiting, and the mechanics of avoidance

Things you can carry to keep people from sitting next to you on the bus. is a ranked effectiveness chart for a strategy everybody has used and nobody has described. Places You Can’t Just Walk Into is a taxonomy of thresholds. Time Spent at Six Flags is a breakdown in which the rides are not the large slice.

Things you spend time on whilst in the shower and Things I accomplished this weekend both plot unstructured time, and the second is the more honest of the two.

Hygiene, twice

Two separate charts here count handwashing — Hand Washing by Demographic from October 2008 and Number of times hands washed daily from December of the same year. Neither is a response to the other; they were submitted independently, two months apart, by different readers who had both decided that this was a thing worth plotting.

That kind of accidental duplication is one of the more interesting properties of an open submission queue, and it happens repeatedly across the archive: the same observation arriving twice, drawn differently, with neither author aware of the other.

Charts here
25
Images recovered
10
Published as plates
2
Referring domains
30
First posted
May 2008
Last posted
Jul 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

    Part Of House On Fire

    · Drawn by John L

  2. A2

    Wake Me Up

    · image not recovered

  3. A3

    Skymall Merchandise Breakdown

    · Drawn by Glen O · image not recovered

  4. A4

    Fig. 1 Shower Temperature VS Knob Position

    · Drawn by Ben E

  5. A5

    Reasons for Replacing my Roof

    · Drawn by Eddie D

  6. A6

    Location of proof

    · Drawn by Cedric B · image not recovered

  7. A7

    Elevator door close time

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

  8. A8

    Hand Washing by Demographic

    · Drawn by Phil B · image not recovered

  9. A9

    Things I accomplished this weekend

    · Drawn by Keaton B · image not recovered

  10. A10

    Number of times hands washed daily

    · Drawn by nitrokitty · image not recovered

  11. Side B
  12. B1

    Contents of a living room

    · image not recovered

  13. B2

    Things you spend time on whilst in the shower

  14. B3

    The glass is half…

    · Drawn by Keeskind · image not recovered

  15. B4

    What’s In The Living room of a house with a toddler

    · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  16. B5

    Why alarm clocks are useful

    · Drawn by VampireVega · image not recovered

  17. B6

    Estimated Distance Between My Car and the Car in Front of Me According to

    · Drawn by Spencer Garrison

  18. B7

    Time Spent at Six Flags

    · Drawn by julianclark17 · image not recovered

  19. B8

    Things you can carry to keep people from sitting next to you on the bus.

    · Drawn by Tangaroa

  20. B9

    THINGS YOU FIND IN A CLOSET

    · Drawn by lolangelpuss

  21. B10

    Benefits of Living Alone

  22. Side C
  23. C1

    Likelihood of Wind vs. Activity

    · Drawn by DooleyBobson · image not recovered

  24. C2

    What I do when people compliment my shirt

    · Drawn by redzoo13 · image not recovered

  25. C3

    Places You Can’t Just Walk Into

    · image not recovered

  26. C4

    Che Guevara T Shirts vs. The People Who Wear Them

    · 3 domains still link here · published as a plate

  27. C5

    Breakdown of Drivers on the Road

    · Drawn by rinirae · image not recovered

Queries answered

What is in this collection?

Twenty-five charts about the house, the car and the errand, drawn between May 2008 and July 2010: bathrooms, closets, living rooms, roofs, buses, elevators and the road.

Which is the best-known chart here?

Fig. 1 Shower Temperature VS Knob Position, from July 2008. The title’s use of a figure number is deliberate, and the curve it plots, a long flat stretch and then a cliff, is the correct shape for almost every mixer tap ever fitted.

Is the elevator chart in this collection?

Elevator door close time, from September 2008, is here and published as its own plate. It plots perceived duration against whether you are holding something, which is a real psychophysical effect drawn as a joke.

What does the collection say about cars?

Very little that is flattering. Estimated Distance Between My Car and the Car in Front of Me According to plots the same gap as judged by different parties, and Breakdown of Drivers on the Road is a taxonomy with no favourable category in it.

Why are some entries listed without an image?

The original images lived on a service that now errors for all of them, so each was recovered from a surviving copy. Where no copy survived, the title, date and address are kept as the record.