I See What You Mean

Recommended: a new review "zoo"

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 17:11:00 +0000

"A Tour Through the Visualization Zoo" is a fantastic introduction to some attractive and sophisticated new visualization formats. The article and illos were put together by Stanford's Jeffrey Heer, Michael Bostock, and Vadim Ogievetsky. Heer is an HCI/visualization genius whose journal articles I've been following with interest; Bostock is the whiz behind the D3 archive of javascript code for visualization.

Run, don't walk. It's great.

Sociological mapping on a grand scale in London

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 23:12:00 +0000

Booth’s Maps are important documents of mass poverty, but by drilling down and giving huge amounts of detail, they do more than analyze it statistically,” said Beverly Cook, curator of social and working history at the Museum of London. “Many writers and artists of the time saw London as a divided city, split between rich and poor, but these maps show its complexities. In many respects, they give a more realistic portrayal of working class life in London than Charles Dickens’s novels.

By making something so complicated seem straightforward, Booth’s Poverty Map was also a triumph of information design. It fulfilled one of design’s most useful functions — helping us to make sense of the world — by distilling an avalanche of information into a clear, coherent form.

An Early Triumph in Information Design - NYT.com

Resource Recommendation: an "illustrated chronology of innovations"

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 23:11:00 +0000

Michael Friendly and Daniel J. Denis have a wonderful interactive timeline on milestones in the theory and practice of data visualization. Be prepared to spend a lot of time there; it's a deep well.

Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Visualization

Installation of Interest: Data Communication/Visualization

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 14:46:00 +0000

Check out Lauren Manning's installation/survey about data visualization methods.

She has created and mounted 40-odd versions of a big yet easy-to-understand data set. Viewers can show her which versions attracted them most strongly, got them thinking, and so forth by marking up "experience cards" that show the array in miniature.

My own faves tend to be those that illustrate the proportions of different foods in fresh ways (mostly in the Abstract/Complex quadrant of her matrix), rather than just showing images and labeling them with numbers (the Simple/Literal quadrant).

Among those I like best:

Food by Line Weight
Concentric Circles
Shaded Box Chart
Stacked Bar Chart and Mini Months

At the same time, I found a few of the formats hard to grasp; one such is the Rainbow Diagram Full Circle. I don't understand the purpose of the connections or the meaning of the line width. It needs a legend, at the very least.

Still, the photoset/installation overall is very much worth a look. Well done, Ms. Manning.

Some people are tired of all the debt charts.

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 00:41:00 +0000

Alex Pareene, at Salon, for one:

I can explain the magnitude of the federal debt pretty easily: The recession caused revenue to plummet, and tax rates have been very low for years. Plus wars. But I explained that with words. Who reads words? No one, unless those words have lines next to them, or colored bars.

America's Deficit Chart Surplus -- Salon

US debt charts of note

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:58:00 +0000

On Sunday, July 24, the New York Times ran a chart illustrating the fiscal results of national policy. Given the fierceness of the ongoing debt-ceiling debate, the chart got picked up and disseminated through the web, and with good reason: It's clear, it's straightforward, and it communicates something very important. (By the way, I have it on good authority that this was the first instance of color being used on the NYT editorial page.) You can see the chart here.

Now, finally, comes the White House with this graphic:

The Atlantic's James Fallows likes it, but I'm less impressed.

First of all, from a political point of view, it's a bit late to release this; the chart could/should have focused the congressional debate and the public discourse weeks ago.

Secondly, despite the telltale Tufte-style typefaces and additional detail, it's not as intuitively readable as the Times' version. The timeline, such as it is, runs vertically, while the magnitude is also mapped along the Y-axis. That's confusing. Also, using the X-axis to delineate surplus vs. debt would work better if there were more than two columns shown (i.e., where is the historical context?). Conceptually it's a little muddy, too; the X-axis suggests a timeline, because the left column expresses info from an earlier era.

Still, despite these small graphic issues and the very grim news that's expressed, it's good to see infoviz taking an important role in national discussions. For me, it's one small reason to be cheerful.

Quality dataviz about quality-of-life issues

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 13:18:00 +0000

To accompany its Better Life Initiative, OECD (the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) has put up a handsome, carefully constructed set of interactive data graphics called the Better Life Index:

There is more to life than the cold numbers of GDP and economic statistics – this Index allows you to compare well-being across countries, based on 11 topics the OECD has identified as essential, in the areas of material living conditions and quality of life.

Each country is represented by a multicolored flower with 11 petals (OK, yes, potentially cheesy). The length of each petal represents the country's score in a given area; the width of the petal indicates the importance the user has assigned to that particular aspect. Drilling down into the details is easy to do; in fact, if you've a mind to do your own visualizations of this info, the underlying index data can be downloaded in spreadsheet format.

Kudos to Moritz Stefaner, Jonas Leist and Timm Kekeritz (for Raureif design consultancy, Berlin).

Infoviz in 2011: a status report

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 18:38:00 +0000

"I predict that we will see a lot more visualization in journalism. A lot of stories are already about numbers, with language mostly telling readers the conclusions. Simple charts with some interaction can provide a bit more context, and more can be added very easily. I doubt that we'll see a big visual journalism revolution in 2011, mostly because of the lack of accessible and practical tools, but we will see a lot more experimentation. The increasing demand will lead to more journalism-focused services being provided by visualization websites, in particular ones that also provide the analytic capabilities (i.e., not just pretty charts)."

-- from "The State of Information Visualization, 2011," by UNC Charlotte's Robert Kosara. Emphasis added, as this is exactly What We Do here at Synoptical Charts.

Cool Map: Emissions worldwide

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 13:59:00 +0000

From the Center for Public Integrity comes this interactive map showing greenhouse gas emissions from many of the world's largest economies.

Lots of data is packed into this simple interface, and the map itself is blessedly clear.

Note, though, that when it comes to infoviz issues, even these pros needed a do-over. Check out the message in the lower left corner. In an earlier version they made the common mistake of comparing circles based on radius, instead of by area. It's to their credit that not only did they fix the mistake, but they also owned up to it and made the change. The larger problem, though, is that distinguishing the relative size of circles is not easy for the average viewer; rectangles are clearer, and would probably have made this cool map even stronger.

Note also that stats are from 2005. Since then there's been substantial economic growth in China (for example), so the current numbers are likely to be even higher than what's shown here.

Differing Views Cloud Climate Talks — Center for Public Integrity

Cool Map: Lincoln's county-by-county map of slave population

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 14:14:00 +0000

A sobering look at U.S. social conditions, circa 150 years ago. Notice how concentrated slave ownership is in the areas surrounding the major rivers (the Mississippi Delta is one obvious example) and near the largest ports (Houston, the Chesapeake region, Charleston). If you want more detail, there's an interactive version at NYTimes.com.

Happy New Year: 2011

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 21:36:00 +0000

My New Year's gift to all y'all is this recommendation:

RUN DON'T WALK to download Google Refine. (No affiliation, just a satisfied customer.) Refine is an app that expedites data cleaning, thereby eliminating hours and hours of tedium and letting me get to the fun parts of the project sooner.

Google Refine

I will certainly be putting it through its paces this year. If you do check it out, let me know what you think.

Practicing scales

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 22:24:00 +0000

As a response to Kai Krause's Africa map, Jeffrey Winter shows us just how small Vatican City really is.

The True Size of Vatican City - xefer.com [via The Power of Data Visualization]

Cool Map: Beer

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 17:11:00 +0000

Check out this Cool Map for an amusing view of brew. It was apparently created by the nightspot mavens at Sloshspot.

Cool Maps #1

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 19:15:00 +0000

I have been running across some incredible infomaps recently. Result: A new feature here on ISWYM.

Here's today's Cool Map, created by Kalimedia.

The United States of the Home Ruler, from the Atlas of True Names

Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 02:21:00 +0000

Charles Booth: "distilling an avalanche of information"

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 18:06:00 +0000

Belated kudos to this fascinating infoviz item from mid-May.

Mr. Booth had set out to discover how many people were living in poverty, to determine why and what could be done to help them. As well as proving that there was much more poverty in London than the official statistics suggested, his research revealed the nuances of an increasingly complex city with different degrees of hardship, where the rich often lived alongside the poor. Still seen as landmarks of sociological research, his maps are to be exhibited in the new Galleries of Modern London opening Friday at the Museum of London.

“Booth’s Maps are important documents of mass poverty, but by drilling down and giving huge amounts of detail, they do more than analyze it statistically,” said Beverly Cook, curator of social and working history at the Museum of London. “Many writers and artists of the time saw London as a divided city, split between rich and poor, but these maps show its complexities. In many respects, they give a more realistic portrayal of working class life in London than Charles Dickens’s novels.”

An Early Triumph in Information Design - NYTimes.com

Kai Krause is a genius.

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 19:29:00 +0000

Eloquent yet immediately comprehensible. A dead-simple concept that illustrates a great truth. Because it is based on extremely solid data (geographic size, which is as close to actual fact as we can get; another good example is population), the result is inarguable. Exemplary.

Mapping Stereotypes: all knowledge is contextual

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 15:22:00 +0000

Designer Yakov Tsvetkov (alphadesigner) has a lovely series of maps depicting how various people around the world see their national neighbors.


This is the view from the USA.

The series conveys a lot about insularity, provinciality, metadata, and the human drive to categorize (based on whatever aspects seem most important to them). Is it shorthand, or is it prejudice, or both?

Philosophical issues aside, this amusing series is definitely worth exploring. Bon voyage!

Animated map of Afghan engagements from 2004-2009

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 00:56:00 +0000

See it now.

Based on the recent Wikileaks release of military documents, Mike Dewar and Drew Conway created this animated month-by-month infographic showing the number and location of engagements over five years in Afghanistan. Beautiful work and very sobering.

Animated Heatmap of WikiLeaks Report Intensity in Afghanistan - Zero Intelligence Agents

Representation of taxation

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:56:00 +0000

Regular readers of this space may recall that I'm partial to tax-related infoviz. So imagine my excitement in coming across this beaut from the Washington Post:

How the fight over tax breaks affects your bottom line

Here in the US, the Bush tax cuts are set to expire soon, and the government has several possible courses of action. This graphic interactively depicts three scenarios, and the impact that each would have on the federal budget as well as the taxpayers'.

Why it's great:

Clean, spare, streamlined. The options are clearly delineated (via tabs) and the change in outcomes is evident and easy to understand.
Needless details about taxpayer cohorts (homeownership, filing status, that sort of thing) are wisely avoided; the captions on the vertical axis provide the necessary macro context.
The attractive tan-to-red color scheme/progression is subtle yet distinct; though the colors hang together to keep the graphic unified, each of the seven subsets is quite distinct.

Putting on my critic's hat, I'd also point out some stuff that's a bit confusing:

Most often with line charts, the x-axis is a timeline. So it was hard for me not to automatically interpret the vertical gray dividing lines as year markers and see the horizontal lines as temporal indicators.

But this graphic is actually a matrix masquerading as a line chart. In truth, the format is column-centered; rolling over each label at bottom brings up the relevant pop-up and percentage figures... So if the labels are where the real action is, why put them at the bottom?

Alternatively, I imagined separating the columns from one another, with a little white space between. That would lessen the momentum and power of the horizontal lines.

Also, I have a personal thing about bubble charts - it's hard to compare the relative size of circles. (Take, for instance, the difference between the circles for $583 and $1016; does the lower one really look like only 60% of the one above?) Comparing rectangles is much easier, according to the reports I've seen.

In the scheme of things, though, these are minor matters. Congrats to the WaPo for this nice piece of infoviz.

Piggybacking off of Kaiser Fung

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:52:00 +0000

At his blog Junk Charts, statistics jock Kaiser Fung cleans up the clunkers. And very well too, I might add.

Here's a revamp he did of an eyecatching-but-not-very-useful graphic depicting Americans' changes in religious affiliation (data via Pew).

I like his clever format, with the arrows pointing in all directions.

However, at some point a data set is too small to be worth visualizing, per Tufte, and should be displayed as a table instead. Here, ET does a rethink of a statistical table that molds the numbers into an elegant and useful hybrid, a "table-graphic."

I wondered if a hybridized display would work well for the Pew data set, so I gave it a try.

Usefully simple, or too simplistic? Comments welcomed.

Data-driven journalism: an idea whose time has come

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:08:00 +0000

On August 24 in Amsterdam the European Journalism Centre is running a conference called "Data-driven journalism: What is there to learn?"

Oh, man. I hope the American journalists are listening in. Because there's a lot to learn, in both senses: 1) what patterns and insights can we get from the data, and 2) how can we better deploy the technology?

Infoviz is finally gaining widespread renown as a storytelling technique/analysis tool, and I predict that publications will eventually need to use it if they aim to keep current readers and entice new ones.

As a longtime journalist and infoviz evangelist, I've been looking forward to this convergence. It may sound corny, but I believe that when information is depicted clearly and intelligently, the graphical evidence really can help people understand the problems they share and point the way to new solutions.

Communication breaks down all around us -- why not use as many effective techniques as possible?

A salute to David McCandless

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:50:00 +0000

The auteur of Information is Beautiful has created a wry visualization of Wikipedia's Lamest Edit Wars (excerpted above). It is a thing of beauty.

That's not helpful!

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 17:38:00 +0000

Sometimes people think the only purpose of an information graphic is to bust out some cool fonts and intersperse the words with some images that are more entertaining than just a table of numbers.

Apparently Phil Gyford has had enough of these pikers.

Sometimes it ain't in the way you say it, it's what you've got to say in the first place.

Scanning the headlines: Newsmap

noreply@blogger.com (CW Campbell) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:40:00 +0000

Presenting headline news (via Google) in the age of information visualization.

This is Newsmap, created by Marcos Weskamp, a Bay Area design engineer who does infoviz and interaction design. Here's how this treemap works:

As you mouse over each box, a callout pops up containing that story's first few sentences.
Across the top are the different countries you can focus on, or you can select all for a worldwide sample.
In the lower right corner are tabs corresponding to different newspaper sections (the colors of which are reflected in the map); again, you can customize the newsmap to suit your interests.

Bravo, Marcos.