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jonahx
Curious what the advantage is (in general) of sparklines over, say, a line of circles with filled in = win and empty = loss? you could use a red fill color for streaks of 4 or more. It seems to me a solution like that would have less clutter and better communicate the data...
goldenchrome
A single line of circles allows for less information density. If you force it to have the same information density then you lose a lot of legibility. Secondly, it's possibly harder to see where outliers are. I find this especially true when the vast majority of the dataset is 0, and you're looking for the outlying 1s.

See this example I mocked up, where each line has the same number of data points: http://i.imgur.com/xRoY41c.png

jonahx
Thanks for taking the time to do that.
rooviz
Thanks, that example illustrates the information density point very well!
kpil
What does the partial horizontal line indicate in Tufte's example?
indyz
Looking at the Bosox 2009 schedule, it looks like the horizontal line indicates home games.
macintux
Indeed. 2nd paragraph on the linked page:

"This example is from Tufte's site, and was made in collaboration with Adam Schwartz. The presence of a horizontal line represents a home game."