From the Graphic Arts Dept.

Edward Tufte is one of the great graphic art thinkers of our time, and his seminar on visual images was one of the most stimulating I've ever attended. So far, I've only managed one small homage to Tufte in our press guides, a take-off on his concept of a "spark line" -- a single graphic that would convey meaning that usually takes columns of numbers.
We had these little graphs for each season of women's basketball in our last guide.
Those are four random years I pulled out, but you can see that it allows the reader a quick comparison of the seasons without tracing a finger down year-by-year lists. It's pretty obvious that almost every year, we get out to a fast start. Conference play -- the black marks -- is always streaky, but the last one is really a roller coaster -- five losses, six wins, seven losses.
Here's our explanation of the sparklines from this year's press guide. I hope you can read it.