I'm in an analytics class and we've been looking at how to effectively display data visually. I'm posting the first draft of my project here and would like to solicit your input! I am not a graphic designer, but prettiness is not the point of the project. The point is to concisely and effectively display data to demonstrate a problem. Please look at the image below and tell me what conclusions you draw from it and any input for improving clarity. Not married to the title either. Data on # of deaths from Israeli Foreign Ministry, select events from the ADL. Thanks all!!
The major problem that I have with it is that your time line is marked by black lines of varying length on the graph itself. This leads to the assumption on the part of the reader that the lines' lengths have some quantitative meaning. It takes further reading to realize they don't. Second, if you're trying to make a point, you need some kind of correlated data displayed. You don't seem to be showing, or attempting to show, a correlation between an action of the government of Israel (or another state) and a resultant spike or reduction in terror deaths. Perhaps a better way to display the data would be as percent change in deaths from terror in the six months following a new security measure as compared to the six months before. That way you might be able to display a trend (or lack thereof) to your audience. Right now it doesn't convince me of anything, especially not concisely.
so after wrestling with excel for entirely too long, I have a chart sans events with a linear regression showing an increase in violence over time and a chart with percent change over time. But I don't know how to apply these to show correlation?? i dropped most of pre-independence too for clarity. percent change chart not included because it's entirely too many data points to make sense right now. Clean chart below, still need to put events in 
Wish I had a moment to help but busy until tomorrow. What I meant was to calculate the percent change in terror deaths after a security measure was put in place, and compare to times before the measure was adopted. Your final graph might only have two bars. Send me your raw data with the timeline, and I'll make an example of what I'm trying to say tomorrow morning, if you don't mind me butting in. Otherwise I'll just try to explain better when I have more time.
No worries! It's not due til Thursday. I'll shoot you that info when I'm back at my desk. Thanks for all your help!
yikes ok after 40 mins i am still struggling in excel to get a (A2/A1)-1 function to work...
you're right re: the lines. they were kind of done haphazardly in order to make things fit. that's a good catch and the kind of thing that would cost me points. I'll play around with percentages and see what that looks like.