Album de Statistique Graphique - Carte Figurative des Chomages des Voies Navigables en 1884. (Unemployment of the inland waterways in 1884.) [12515.025]
The pattern
This still is filed under Data as proof.
Define
A chart, map, or count that is the argument, not an illustration next to the argument.
Mechanism
Sighted evidence. The reader is asked to believe their eyes: a bar, a share, a spread on a map.
Verdict
The claim is comparative or quantitative and the figure can be read without a caption doing the sell.
Why it works
Duration is encoded as band thickness on the object that was actually shut, which fuses the what, the where and the how long into one mark. Holding the palette to two colours makes the whole network readable as a single comparison and leaves the base map free to recede. The inset is the release valve: where the data is too dense to resolve at national scale, the same encoding is repeated larger rather than simplified, so the reader never has to change visual language. The dated script along each band lets a reader move from pattern to specific incident without any other document.
Steal this when
Use this structure for downtime, outages or blocked capacity across a network - rail, pipelines, plant lines, servers - where the argument is that the losses cluster in particular places and particular months. The two-colour split band is the move to copy when two measures must be compared segment by segment rather than in aggregate.