At the end of each month I pull together a collection of links to some of the most relevant, interesting and useful articles I’ve come across during the previous month. If you follow me on Twitter you will see many of these items tweeted as soon as I find them. Here’s the latest collection from August 2010:
Advertising Age | Why data visualization is about to become very important for your brand | Link
Creative Review | Interesting article about ‘liking’ | Link
TedTalks | Video of David McCandless’ recent TedTalk at the Oxford event | Link
Science Notes 2010 | Computer scientists have created tools to help people visualize information and draw meaningful conclusions – Olga Kuchment charts their course | Link
Core77 | Why great ideas can fail – by Don Norman | Link
O’reilly Radar | Redesiging the New York subway map | Link
Creative Review | The Times does info-graphics for iPads | Link
Eager Eyes | The difference between infographics and visualization | Link
Wired | Data information: How visual tools can transform lives | Link
Flowing Data | Exploring the reach of Firefox | Link
Eager Eyes | Review of Cornelia Dean’s book “Am I making myself clear?” | Link
London Datastore | From journalists to interpreters – is data changing the way we work? | Link
ACM Queue | A Conversation with Jeff Heer, Martin Wattenberg, and Fernanda Viégas | Link
Adaptive Path Blog | Beyond “I hate green:” Managing Productive Visual Design Reviews | Link
How Big Really? | BBC dimensions takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of your choice | Link
Junk Charts | Book review: Interactive Graphics for Data Analysis| Link
Flowing Data | Browse street-side with Microsoft Street Slide | Link
Juice Analytics | Applying a chart makeover to Fed IT Dashboard | Link
Wired | Data information: How visual tools can transform lives | Link
Designing with data | Data visualization “milestones” | Link
FORA.tv | Video of John Maeda talking about the “Laws of Simplicity for Design and Business” | Link
The Guardian | Growth forecasts of a collapsing economy: visualising the story of a recession | Link
The Guardian | Hollywood’s new colour craze – how the practice of tweaking the palette of films in post-production has exploded | Link
Flowing Data | How data will improve health care | Link
Lost Garden | Visualising the creative process | Link
Flowing Data | A second talk from Martin Wattenberg about data and visualization | Link
Computer World | Web multimedia: 6 reasons why Flash isn’t going away | Link
The Learning Coach | Using graphics to improve learning | Link
Visual Journalism | The next big thing in infographics – five criterias and a solution | Link
Matt.Might | The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. | Link
Urban Daddy | The craziest dashboard I’ve seen in a while | Link
Technology Story | The Artist, the Geek, and the Business Expert | Link
A VisWeek Workshop | Using visualization to create narratives and engage audiences | Link
A new political blog/sub-domain of the New York Times website officially launched this week and you should keep your eyes on its progress – the FiveThirtyEight blog. This blog will bring together the visualisation prowess of the NYT with the political knowledge and statistical modelling capabilities of Nate Silver and his team of collaborators.
During the presidential election of 2008 Nate used a unique methodology taken from his experiences in analysing baseball to introduce a new approach for calculating polling data based on demographic data and taking into consideration factors around historical trends, sample sizes and how recent sample polls were taken.
Using computer modeling to generate huge numbers of simulated elections (Monte Carlo method?) to help predict the outcomes of the various stages of the election, he rapidly developed a reputation for incredible accuracy, eventually correctly forecasting the winners of 49 of the 50 states and every one of the 35 Senate races.
The fivethirtyeight blog has existed to discuss, share and analyse the statistical information its models generate before and throughout the 2008 election and also since then, covering many different topics and applications of forecasted statistical information.
You should expect some fantastic visualisation output as a result of this partnership, as Silver acknowledges:
“The New York Times, which is not only hosting the blog but is enlisting its team of interactive journalists and graphics experts to deepen and enhance it… Fundamentally, I’ve always seen FiveThirtyEight’s mission as being parallel to journalism: objectivity and accuracy have been core values of the blog, but it has also prized clarity of thought and of written and visual communication.”
The September issue of Creative Review is out now and includes two sections dedicated to data visualisation.
The first is an article by Nicholas Felton (both the designer and subject of the popular Felton Report series) which follows up the July release of the Little Book of Shocking Global Facts and the reaction to this that dominated the blogosphere.
Nicholas accuses the designers behind this book of making significant errors in its presentation of information, in both the visual treatment of the visualisation designs and, importantly, the accuracy of some of the data representations. I’m glad they gave the opportunity for Jon Abbott of Barnbrook Design to respond to the criticisms – these situations are always more constructive when there is two-sided dialogue.
I am pleased to see that my own post on this subject, ‘Worst graph design ever?‘, has been mentioned in this piece (the rewards of inflammatory post titles!) – I guess I”ll let the copy editor off for the unfortunate auto-hyphenation of the site’s URL!
The second piece in this issue comes from Rebecca Pohancenik who reveals that “data visualisation, far from being a modern practice, has its roots in the investigations of 17th century scientists”.
Rebecca presents an interesting timeline of some of the earliest concepts of information design with examples from the likes of Edmond Halley, Joseph Priestley, Christiaan Huygens and Benjamin Franklin to name but a few. It is really refreshing to see several new examples presented here (well, new to me at least), rather than the now-typical exhibits from Florence Nightingale, William Playfair and Charles Joseph Minard.
It is of course great to see data visualisation receiving attention from such a prominent magazine as Creative Review. Its just a shame that this opportunity largely comes about in response to the Barnbrook project and therefore has to be occupied with offering a somewhat negative critique and reaction to this work, rather than being a more positive discussion and showcase of the subject’s merits and best practices. Hopefully, there will be further opportunities in due course to fulfil the latter.
This is a follow-up post to my second article in the Visualisation Insights series which I published early this week. The purpose of this companion series is to optimise the learning opportunities from each insights article, reflecting on the ideas, issues and observations to emerge.
Why did I choose this subject?
As I mentioned in the main article, I first came across Tiago’s site in June when I was looking around the web for examples of world cup visualisations and found that he had compiled his own great collection for InspiredMag. I subscribed to his Visual Loop RSS Feed and from that point on I have been feasting on a fullsome diet of infographic and visualisation examples from around the world.
My interest in inviting Tiago to take part in this article was based on my great appreciation of the role he is playing in sourcing, collecting and sharing these examples from all corners of the world. In the space of a few months, he has found and published nearly 4,500 graphics which gives him a unique perspective on the visualisation and infographic field. I also feel a sense of connection in the progress of Visual Loop given that I launched Visualising Data around the same time.
Impressions prior to the interview?
I see the visualisation field, as with any subject or discipline, as an organic system comprised of many different members, roles, energies and influencing forces. For this system to operate most effectively it requires a broad balance of different perspectives and functions which help to simultaneously navigate and fuel the subject’s evolution.
As a Content Curator, Tiago takes on a particularly important role by gathering and sharing with the rest of us the work that is taking place within and around this field. In many ways he takes on the capacity of a connector – a role identified and described in Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point:
Connectors are the people who link us up with the world, … the kinds of people who know everyone and possess special gifts for bringing the world together. They are “a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack, … for making friends and acquaintances. Gladwell attributes the social success of connectors to “their ability to span many different worlds as a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability, and energy.”
He’s not there to filter, critique, judge or progress the field from a theoretical perspective – rather, his diligent discovery work supports the rest of us in the field. Completing the Tipping Point list of roles, some of us take on the alternative duties of mavens (“trusted experts and information specialists in a particular field, who accumulate and pass on knowledge”) and salesmen (“the select group of people with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing”) to keep the subject moving forward.
Impressions after the interview?
The most striking aspect of Tiago’s interview is the refreshingly neutral standpoint which gives him a particularly non-cynical, positive and energetic perspective. His career experiences have heightened his awareness of the influence effective communication of information can have and it is great to see somebody arrive in this field from such a background. His opinions are therefore very interesting and valuable particularly as he is not affected by the Curse of Knowledge many of us can be influenced by.
As defined on the Visual Loop site, the stream of visual graphics supplied are not meant to be a showcase of best practice, they contain both good and bad demonstrations of the craft. As I said in my introduction to the main article exposure to bad practice is as helpful as seeing good practice, it helps to enhance your understanding of ideal design principles. I have certainly taken a great deal of value from this provision of the good and the bad.
Acknowledgement
Once again many thanks to Tiago for breaking off from his relentless Visual Loop stream and participating in this article, which, like the Michael Deal interview, has been a very popular post – hello to the many new readers from South America particularly! I know Tiago has great ambitions with Visual Loop and I wish him all the best in his pursuit.
Keep your eye out for future insights articles, with many interesting interviews and interviewees lined up…
This is the second part of my recently launched Visualisation Insights series. The purpose of this series is to provide readers with unique insights into the field of visualisation from the different perspectives of those in the roles of designer, practitioner, academic, blogger, journalist and all sorts of other visual thinkers. My aim is to bring together these interviews to create a greater understanding and appreciation of the challenges, approaches and solutions that exist in the worlds of these people – the visualisation field’s ‘cast and crew’.
Tiago Veloso is an Independent Content Curator and Marketing/Branding Consultant based in Brazil. He runs the very popular Visual Loop website which is described as:
A non-stop stream of links to infographics, maps, charts and many other worldwide visualization designs that make the process of understanding our life a bit easier… or not. It’s not a showcase of good or bad design. It’s just… a Visual Loop.
I came across Tiago’s site in June when I was researching my series of posts around the World Cup visualisations and found it to be a fantastic resource for discovering worldwide visualisations and infographics, good and bad, all of which helps to sharpen our identification and appreciation of best practice design principles and expose ourself to latest trends in topic or approach. As a prolific collector and sharer of all this content I thought it would be interesting to discover more about Tiago’s experiences around the visualisation and infographic field.
Tiago, can you give me a brief outline of your training/career background leading up to the launch of Visual Loop?
I have a degree in Hotel Management and I worked for more than 15 years in the travel and tourism industry, from restaurants and hotels in Europe, to catering for oil platforms in Angola, and ecotourism in Brazil. A big part of those experiences involved a permanent contact with people from all over the world, providing me, among other things, with an understanding of how important the use of data visualization can be as way of establishing a bridge of communication in situations where, sometimes, traditional speech wasn’t enough.
You describe yourself as a content curator which is a fascinating job description – can you give a bit more detail and insight into this world?
We’re literally bombarded with an unthinkable amount of information. Of course, a lot of developments have been made in order to make the job of dealing with that easier, but even so, it’s pretty hard to keep a clean stream of what’s really important. On the other hand, with the increasing importance of social media as a marketing and branding tool, the quality of the content a company creates and shares with their followers/friends/readers is, probably, the biggest differential one can create to add value to their services and products – and that takes time and investment, especially in people.
As a content curator, I offer companies a guarantee of minimum prime content that assures that their social media presence is constantly adding value, a part of all the marketing and promotional actions they can make in those channels.
When or what was your “aha!” moment in terms of discovering visualisation/infographics?
Social media, is, above all, a consequence of the evolution of mankind, and in my work in the tourism and travel industry I had to quickly adapt to major cultural differences. Basically, I believe that the true value of social media is the possibility of extending beyond physical boundaries what I did during all those years: to be willing to help, engage, and serve people from all parts of the world.
So, during that process of establishing myself as a content curator, I needed a way to easily communicate with all those different “worlds”, and, like I said, data visualization always seemed to be a great way of achieving that – both to “tell” and “hear” and learn.
I’ve been collecting infographics for quite sometime, but the amount of information visualizations that started to pop-up on the Internet, for the past 2 years, made the task of organizing them much harder, even with bookmarking tools. That was when I decided to start my own online collection, hoping that it could also be of some value to others.
For those unfamiliar with your site, can you describe what it is and what your overall aims are? What motivated you to start the site?
Visual Loop is a non-stop stream of links for data-visualizations, such as infographs, maps, charts, diagrams and others. And when I say non-stop, it’s literally 24/7 – within 7 months, I’ve posted over 4300, which is indeed a big number.
Another peculiarity is that its not about the design, but mostly about the information, and it covers a wide variety of topics – something that is also important for my work, because I have clients from all segments and industries.
I don’t have a “designer” background, like most of the blogs on this topic, and I don’t do “reviews”. And it’s great to see that that’s one of the most appreciated things by the designers that follow Visual Loop. Most of them see it as a way of quickly getting access to an amount of infographics about a specific topic, without preconceptions, and be inspired both by the “good” as by the “bad” designs.
Without giving away any trade secrets can you describe your approach to managing this site and its incredible stream of content? What sites/services do you use to fully immerse yourself in the subject? How do you find, identify and collect the content you publish? Can you explain your selection policy for including certain graphics? When do you sleep?
As a good friend of mine put it once, I’m the CEO of Visual Loop. As in Chief Everything Officer. It’s all done by me, and the only way I can keep the stream is because I invested 6 months on tracking down sources from all over the world. Of course it helps a lot not being so concerned about the “quality”, or a specific topic, and the fact that I post designs from different places, including non-English speaking countries.
Tumblr, which I chose as a platform because of its simplicity, allows me to queue the posts on a very intuitive way, making it possible to keep the stream going even when I’m working – or sleeping
As for the sources, besides the main blogs, Flickr, and some Ning networks are among my favorite places to find new stuff.
From your own perspective, how would you describe your own visualisation/design style or preferences? eg. Who would you describe as being the most influential authors/designers that most closely match your ‘taste’? Do you have a particular favourite graphic?
I try not to be too much personal about the designs I post, like I said. But I’m particularly fond of editorial infographics, the ones we see in newspapers and magazines, and interactive ones. It’s pretty much impossible for me to select one favorite, after more than 4000 posts, but I could mention the ones I’ve included on some of the posts I wrote for Inspired Magazine: Infographics from Brazil and some of the Interactive resources mentioned in this post.
What would you describe as being the key milestones of progress since you began the site? You must have some fairly amazing stats/figures associated with your work to date?
Things have been happening very quickly, beyond my wildest expectations. The 4000 posts mark was something that made say “Wow!! It’s moving fast!”. But the biggest achievement so far was to be included in Alltop’s list for infographics, among some of the big names. It really took me by surprise.
In terms of website stats, the number I’m most proud of is the 3.5% Bounce Rate – when people discover Visual Loop, they usually spend quite some time there.
But even so, the numbers never were a priority – I keep Visual Loop ad-free, so as long as people visit it and recommend it as a source, the “mission accomplished” feeling is there.
Some readers will have seen that you have produced a number of articles for InspiredMag and I see you’ve also recently started contributing to Randall Hand’s VizWorld site? How did these opportunities come about?
Those were also two important milestones, of course.
With Inspired Magazine, it all started with a comment I left on a post about infographic blogs, in which I mentioned Visual Loop as an additional resource. Immediately they included it on that same post, and I received an invitation from Catalin Zorzini to write a guest post. And from that point on, I’ve been making monthly contributions.
On the other hand, with Randall’s VizWorld it was a bit different. I started to notice that some of their posts were mentioning Visual Loop as a source, and we started exchanging emails about a possible contribution. We decided to try out a Daily round-up of 5 or 6 infographics, named it Daily Viz from Visual Loop, and it’s been working out like that since July.
What plans and ambitions do you have for the future with Visual Loop? What would you expect visitors will see in 12 months time, for example?
A couple of months ago, I started asking for advice, critics and suggestions from my readers, and a lot of great ideas came up. I’m still in that process of fully understanding their expectations, and for now, my only guarantee is that the stream of infographics will continue. Keeping the stream going and making the search process easier are the top priorities.
From my own experiences researching my world cup visualisation posts, it struck me how much amazing design work is emerging from Brazil and South America in general, how do you see the state of the visualisation/infographics field? How would you compare it with the rest of the world, do you notice any clear, regional differences in techniques or design approach?
No doubt that there are big differences, both in design style and in the use of data-visualization, as far as an “amateur” can appreciate. Even someone who’s not a designer can see that the cultural and social environment plays a tremendous role on the way information is designed and displayed. I think South American designers, especially in Brazil, have a much more “freestyle” approach, innovating with a mix of vibrant colors and detailed illustrations, without polluting or hiding the information.
And I also believe that it has a lot to do with the editorial vision of the magazines and newspapers. Here, it just feels like the text and the infographic are one, as opposed to a “little picture to illustrate the news”.
But, like I said, it’s just a personal point of view, from someone who doesn’t have a “professional” background on the subject.
What are the things that excite you/make you positive about the way the visualisation is advancing? Are there any aspects that particularly frustrate or disappoint you?
Personally, the most impressive fact is the rise of the use of infographics throughout the Internet. I think we’re seeing the replacement of the “Top 10 Lists” by infographics as the main link-bait strategy, and that opens a whole new world of possibilities for the design community. The rise of mobile, broadband expansion, cheaper (and better) devices, all will play their role in making visual thinking more and more mainstream.
I’m especially excited about the impact it can have in countries with a higher educational gap, where the habits of reading are not so traditional like they are in Europe or North-America. With the proper use of data-visualization, combined with all the new technologies, the educational process could be greatly improved, and that is something the “old school, old media” governments still have to pay more attention to – and take advantage.
Finally, a chance for you to recommend or publicise others – apart from the more obvious and popular visualisation-related sites, which other sites/ designer’s would you recommend for readers to take a look at? Are there any designers, particularly around South America, who you would identify as producing particularly innovative work right now?
My first post on Inspired Magazine was precisely about infographic design in Brazil. I selected 10 of my favorite designers, and I’d recommend them all, because, besides being extremely talented, each and every one of them has a particular style – and they all are big supporters of Visual Loop.
Outside Brazil, I must recommend Robin Richards and Tiffany Farrant, both from Bristol (UK), who have produced some of the most amazing graphs I’ve seen, and are also big supporters of the whole Visual Loop concept.
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Many thanks to Tiago for his interesting and detailed responses – in outstanding English – and for his time in participating in this post, I wish him all the success and quality sleep that hopefully awaits him in the future. There are many ways to follow Tiago’s updates, you can find information here or simply follow him on Twitter @TSSVeloso.
Just come across a very slick interactive published on Newsweek, designed by Thomas Klepl and Adam Clarkson. The graphic presents information around Newsweek’s study of health, education, economy and politics to rank the world’s top nations.
The interactive allows you to explore all the data for each country, based around a dynamic parallel coordinates type graphic in the middle. You can select two countries to compare from the list or from the graphic and then view the data in a comparison chart to the right. I like the effects when you hover over each country and it subtly highlights that country’s parallel data. I also like the option to filter the country lists by Country, Income or Population Groupings which emphasises the relevant countries in the graph.
The only minor complaint from a usability perspective is the auto-navigation through the list of countries depending on the position of your mouse pointer – its a bit hard to tame, I’d prefer to just click on the up or down arrows to move through the countries. That aside the rest of the interface works very smoothly and very intuitively.
Congratulations to readers from Finland which emerged as the top country, tough luck to those of you in Burkina Faso, there is always next year…
You can find out more about the methodology Newsweek used to calculate the rankings here.
The OFCOM Communications Market Report 2010 has been published today. For those who don’t know about OFCOM it is the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries and this is arguably their most important and influential annual report.
At 379 pages it represents a significant volume of work and, not surprisingly, contains a huge amount of data and analysis accompanied by a plethora of graphs and tables. Unfortunately, much of these graphical devices add little value to the reader because their purpose hasn’t been identified – a case of graphs for graph’s sake.
I have a great deal of sympathy with the people who have compiled the report, you can just imagine the instructions coming down to them from managers along the lines of “put in plenty of nice fancy graphs, make them colourful”.
We’ve all been there and what’s more we’ve all had to succumb to such requests against our better judgment. This post is not about criticising those who have to produce graphics such as these, it should be seen as an arm around the shoulder for those who have to dance to the tune of clueless people in senior positions. You just would hope that the body responsible for standards and practices concerning communication issues would be able to set the bar a little bit higher with its report presentation.
Anyway, here are some of the graphical lowlights from this report – some of the busiest, confusing and unnecessary graphics from the 100′s presented in this report, see what you make of them:
For a more useful and helpful analysis and narrative about the key findings from this report can be found on the BBC, the Guardian and the Online Journalism Blog.
Over the past couple of months I’ve noticed a number of new examples of streamgraphs working their way around the web. It has prompted me to finally get around to visiting this subject because these graphs always seem to stir great debate, one which seems to perfectly encapsulate the ongoing challenges faced within the visualisation field.
From my own point of view I’ve so far sat very much on the fence, failing to form a specific opinion about where I stand on these graphs. Attracted by their aesthetics but concerned by the ease of their legibility I’ve decided its about time I investigated further.
The purpose of this post, therefore, is to share some of the examples and background information that I have unearthed about streamgraphs to help myself and hopefully others better understand the context of their design and usage.
A journey down the stream…
First, lets take a look at some of the applications of streamgraphs. In some cases these are also known as theme rivers (now a trademark) and steam graphs (largely by those responsible for slight typo’s) but for the purpose of consistency I’ll stick with streamgraphs.
It is an interactive visualisation which reveals the patterns of the amount of money films over a 21 year period make at the box office. The total takings are shown by the varying heights the shapes reach over time. The colour scheme represents the gross takings and the length of each shape reveals its longevity in the cinemas. Clicking on a particular film’s shape will bring up a brief overview of that film with further links to other web pages such as review sites.
The print edition of this graph was presented with a vertical layout (perhaps this is where steamgraph becomes a valid label!?) to fit the natural layout of the newspaper as well as accommodate the lack of interactivity:
At the Malofiej 2009 awards the print- and online-editions of the NYT graphic shared the Peter Sullivan Best of Show Award – a real success for it’s collaborating team comprising Lee Byron, Amanda Cox, Matthew Bloch and Shawn Carter (apologies if any other contributors are missing from this list).
This visualisation built on previous work by Lee Byron who, through his undergraduate studies, developed an innovative means of presenting the changing trends in users’ last.fm listening history. This work showed a stacked graph of all the artists a user has listened to over time with the height representing the number of listens. As Byron describes, “the poster is a sort of virtual mirror, reflecting very personally significant events made visible by the changes in listening trends”.
A paper entitled “Stacked Graphs – Geometry& Aesthetics“, authored by Byron and Martin Wattenberg (2008) provides some fascinating explanatory detail behind this development, both in terms of the technical approaches as well as the design decisions made. I would urge anybody serious about improving their knowledge about visualisation to have a careful read of this paper. It provides great information about the challenges, decisions and contraints associated with crafting innovative visualisation approaches that strive to balance aesthetic appeal with the safeguarding of legibility.
Whilst the Byron et al examples has unquestionably been the most prominent demonstrations of a streamgraph, the approach to visualising multi-layered or stacked themes of data over time first emerged back in 2000 in the work of Susan Havre, Beth Hetzler and Lucy Nowell, detailed in the paper “ThemeRiver: In search of Trends, Patterns and Relationships“.
This paper describes the development of an interactive system called ThemeRiverTM and includes a proof-of-pinciple demonstration using a text analysis engine to analyse the textual content of Fidel Castro’s speeches, interviews and other articles over a 40 year period:
The ThemeRiverTM interface design is described as “simplifying the user’s task of tracking individual themes through time by providing a continuous ‘flow’ from one time point to the next”. Furthermore, “we believe this metaphor is familiar and easy to understand and that it requires little cognitive effort to interpret the visualization”. According to the authors, plotting these thematic patterns over the period against the context of key historical milestones facilitated analysis of possible relationships between Castro’s words and topics and the events that unfolded.
Back to more recent examples, another prominent developer of streamgraphs is Jeff Clark, a designer based in Toronto. The images below present (1) analysis of the most prevalent and interesting topics discussed by the top 100 Twitter users and (2) communicating the ebb and flow of the various characters throughout the books ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer‘ by Mark Twain and (3) ‘The Makers‘ by Cory Doctorow.
Jeff has also produced work for the Harvard Business Review presenting analysis of over half a million tweets referring to the iPad, identifying some of the key text, meme and sentiment trends contained within these tweets and demonstrating how visualisation tools working with Twitter data can provide marketing analysts with important consumer insights.
Continuing the theme, following the recent World Cup, Twitter produced a streamgraph to “illustrate the global nature of the games and how fans’ interest and enthusiasm built over the course of the tournament on Twitter”. Each country’s flag and colours are used to represent the volume of tweets using each ‘hashflag’, with the size of the waves fluctuating with the frequency and consistency of tweets containing each country’s hashflag. In the background, a busy line graph shows the frequency of Tweets per second across the entire service. I find a confusing visual aspect of this graph design is the inclining central axis about which the waves and flows are presented? This is an unexplained, different approach compared to the previous streamgraph examples.
Further examples come from one of my favourite interactive visualisation designers, Moritz Stefaner, who was influenced by Lee Byron’s Last.fm work and developed an iterative range of visualisation solutions to present patterns in the models of tagging structures used on various websites, depicting trends to show how tags emerge and decay in use over time. You can read more about this work here and here.
Another solution to the challenge of presenting multi-layered data comes from Martin Wattenberg’s Baby Name Wizard which is an interactive display of hundreds of thousands of instances of baby names through the years, allowing you to filter individual names and see their individual patterns of popularity.
Next, the relentless innovators at Stamen have recently announced a new visualisation project to explore the incredible the volume of data that is all the IP addresses on the internet. The start-off point for their work has been to come up with a basic metaphor for the project but rather than starting off with a traditional map approach they “wanted to get a sense for the overall flow of things” and so deployed streamgraphs, here to take a look at some specific data around the trends of visitors to British gambling websites.
Stamen have also previously worked on a project to display the changing strength of digital signals that overlay urban landscapes. The visualisation below displays the relative strength and density of networks encountered over time as a participant walks through a city. Each new network creates a new vertical bar and a new colour on the spectrum, fading and disappearing as the signal strength comes and goes. The height of each bar represents the combined strength of the wireless networks currently in range. Open networks are presented above the central line with a white background and closed/private networks are below the line with the grey background.
This next work, by Jure Leskovec, Lars Backstrom and Jon Kleinberg, attempts a similar multi-layered approach for a “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle” project to present the rhythm and flow of news stories across millions of news and media sites and articles over time. The difference with the other streamgraphs approach here is the use of a fixed baseline axis, which I’ll come on to later.
Reaction and debate
As I mentioned in the introduction, the use of the streamgraph approach has been met with particularly polarised reaction. The achievement of the Malofiej award for the NYT graphic team, a significant recognition from an esteemed panel, has stirred great debate particularly due to the increased profile and exposure this award created.
A journey around the many design and visualisation blogs reveals strong sentiments of appeal towards the graphic approach, certainly in terms of the asethetics with terms like “pretty” and “attractive” especially commonplace. In their paper Byron and Wattenberg recognise that “the visual appearance of the graph drew people in or kept them looking at the graphic”.
On the VisualJournalism website, Gert Neilsen admires the elegance of the NYT streamgraph as a technical solution to this complex data challenge but questions the focus of the underlying story behind the graphic, taking the wording of the project’s title to imply an as-yet-undefined purpose. Moreover, he questions if it “would it be too rude to call this category ‘Fun With Numbers’? or a more polite version: ‘Art With an Infographic Function’”.
Whilst the majority of commentators seemed enthused by the visual appeal of the streamgraph approach (a minority unearthing imaginative, x-rated visual comparisons!), the issue of legibility appears to be the central factor determining overall opinion.
This is acknowledged by Byron & Wattendberg and Havre et al, the latter recognising the fundamental challenge of the design: “ideally, a visual metaphor facilitates discovery by presenting data in an intuitive, easy way that lets users interpret the presentation and data without undue strain. Further, the visualization should not mislead the user”.
Alberto Cairo, a former professor who taught online graphics and was a succesful graphics director at El Mundo Online, takes a hardline view describing it as “one of the worst graphics the New York Times have published – ever!”, explaining that our knowledge of the science of cognitive psychology shows the brain is unable to handle overly complex graphics of this nature without sufficient context. In the article referred to above, Gert Neilsen continues to ask if the graph is “too sexy for its own good?” raising a number of technical aspects that undermine the accuracy or readibility of the data points and theme shapes.
There are some very interesting comments on a FlowingData post that followed the publishing of the NYT movie streamgraph. A number of people seemed capable of drawing decent insight from the graph such as which films were instant hits, failures or notable ‘slow burners’ as well as the macro-level seasonality of moviegoing in general. Several praised the data density achieved and the use of colour to distinguish the shape topics and to encode total takings. In the narrative that accompanies the Stamen ‘IP address’ visualisation, there is an acknolwedgement that some people confuse the shapes displayed either side of the central zero-axis and take them to represent positive and negative values. Further comments describe the process of data reading as overly complex and confusing because of the nature of the sloped scales and lack of a coherent axis. This issue is acknowledged in both academic papers mentioned above.
Forming my view point
Visualisation is an optimisation problem. It is about communicating or conveying data in as effective a way as possible, squeezing the maximum value and purpose out of every design variable to achieve and maintain engagement through aesthetic appeal whilst enabling accurate insight to be drawn from the data displayed.
As I often mention in my posts I tend to rely on the simple formula message + data + display to inform my own process of crafting a visualisation and also to judge the success of other designs. It must have a clear message and motivation for being created, it needs to be accompanied by accurate, complete and relevant data, and then packaged and presented with effective design and appropriate display choices.
As I grow increasingly aware of the hidden challenges and significant restraints designers face when executing these projects I have now evolved this formula slightly to include the factor of context – a hugely influential factor on the other components in this formula. To be clear, context is not referring to the message or motivation behind the piece, but the restrictions that exist around the project that largely effect the options available to the designer, whether this is time, physical space, necessary format or practical necessity. Going back to optimisation, this is, crudely, about making something as good as it can be. Often as judges of people’s output we find it easy to criticise without appreciating the limitations inherent in a project’s context nor arriving at a better alternative suggestion.
This is the environment which I feel is particularly prevalent with the discussions that have engulfed the streamgraph. Yet, reading about the background of the developments presented above reveals a very careful, sensitive, delicate, thorough and deliberate journey through the optimisation challenge created by attempting to effectively display such large datasets. Moreover, the designers have clearly got a healthy respect for the dual demands of legibility and visual appeal and an acute awarness of the potential shortcomings that may still exist.
So what do I think? Up until researching this post I was tending towards the view that streamgraphs were very elegant visual constructions that didn’t work particularly effectively as a means of communicating data.
My better informed view is that a streamgraph is a fantastic solution to displaying large data sets to a mass audience (as per the objective introduced in the Byron & Wattenberg paper). They are, however, at their best when existing as an interactive exploratory tool enabling users to take a journey along the flow of patterns, following their curiousities, forming and testing hypotheses as they learn about the data. Techniques such as sorting, filtering, brushing, selecting, panning/zooming, constructing/deconstructing and hiding/showing graphical apparatus supports thorough exploration of the data on both a macro and micro level.
From a technical execution perspective they are fantastic. The complexity of the calculations and layout algorithms, of the interactivity demands (such as the re-drawing required to respond to a change of resolution) and the juggling of design decisions around shape, ordering, labelling and colouring represent hugely impressive technical achievements.
I believe streamgraphs work significantly less well when they exist as a static or print version. Visualisations as technically sophisticated as this, that present data as vast and complex as they do, naturally require subtle trade-offs. Unfortunately, these trade-offs become exposed without interactivity. The main problem facing static streamgraphs lies in the difficulty of reading data points formed by uncommon shapes.
Studies conducted by noted author William Cleveland demonstrated the difficulties in accurately assessing the values formed by curved and sloped shapes like those in the streamgraph. The diagram below is taken from “Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Methods”, Cleveland and McGill (1984) and compares variations of two curved lines on the left with a single line on the right representing the size of the difference between the points along the curved shapes. This experiment reveals the high potential for mis-reading the values of sloped shapes.
With an interactive version, a number of approaches are available to overcome this problem. Firstly, you could include the option for users to show/hide subtle vertical gridlines which would create a vertical path to help the reading of the shape heights. A second option would be to reocgnise the macro version of the streamgraph as an interface device and enable users to select (and therefore filter) a particular shape of interest which would then dynamically become the sole focus of the graphical landscape. An example of this type of transition is found in the NYT graphic which looked at “How Different Groups Spend Their Day“.
This graph displays the percentage of people involved in each activity category across the 24 hours of a typical day. You’ll see that the ambigious shapes are similar formations to those found in the streamgraph, but the power of this graphic is that you can select a specific category and the graph transforms to show only data for that activity (as below). Furthermore, this dynamically altered display is presented against a baseline x-axis which enhances the potential for reading the data and understanding the shape of that activity more accurately.
This type of enhanced interactivity would significantly improve the potential for web-based streamgraphs to allow users to draw accurate insights about the categories and shapes within the overall flow.
Many observers have commented that a clearer display could be achieved by using a traditional stacked area chart as well as having a fixed baseline to aid value-reading. The iterations and experiments that went behind the work of Havre et al and Byron & Wattenberg reveals flaws with these approaches, causing a lack of smoothness and exaggerating the distortion of ongoing theme shapes. In a Q&A discussion, Amanda Cox (part of the NYT movie graph team) describes their decision around including a fixed x-axis:
Matthew [Bloch] actually made a version for people who care deeply about a fixed x-axis. We rejected it because it didn’t do a good job of answering some of the questions that I thought were the most interesting (about peaks and ebbs of individual films). As it is, it’s a lot of fun to look at films like Top Gun and Ghost. In a more traditional chart (like a stacked bar graph), it probably wouldn’t be, unless you were willing to lose the shape of every other film. Different forms do better jobs at answering different types of questions. This form attempts to distort the shape of each film as little as possible; it works well for some types of questions; for others, not so much.
It is no surprise to see the term ‘ebb and flow’ used in several of the streamgraph titles because they genuinely do capture the dynamic and organic relationship within large datasets over time. The key to their success is to maintain this theme of dynamism through rich interactivity to unleash the full potential for user exploration. Furthermore, users need to better understand and appreciate the design optimisation these graphs achieve and, before criticising, recognise that sometimes there are no available, better solutions.
The last 72 hours or has been fairly crazy in the land of Visualising Data, with some notable visualisation stories and discussions popping up in various news and media channels.
Firstly, on Sunday, the Wikileaks organisation picked up on my Tableau visualisations post and tweeted a URL to my site which led to visitor and page view counts going through the roof.
Last night on UK television Information is Beautiful designer David McCandless appeared on the BBC programme Newsnight to discuss the subject of visualisation. UK viewers can watch the debate here (it starts after 26 minutes).
As many others have already commented, it was disappointing to witness this potentially interesting discussion descend into an unnecessarily semi-confrontational debate. The host Kirst Wark facilitated the discussion as if she was dealing with less-than-forthcoming politicians and the designer Neville Brody was obssessed by some cultural/political observation about the last 25 years since Thatcher came into government and seemed intent on undermining David’s work and observations, dismissively commenting that some of it was just “pretty pictures”.
The core reason for this segment was supposed to be about profiling the emergence of visualisation and its importance in making the vast amounts of data we are faced with these days more accessible and engaging through innovative and effective information design methods. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out this way, but at least it put the subject on a mainstream platform and stirred more debate which is always a good thing.
[Incidentally, David McCandless has kindly agreed to be the subject of a future Visualisation Insights article, so watch this space...]
Finally, Creative Review have followed up David’s appearance last night with their own article reflecting on the discussion, presented in the context of one of their previous posts concerning Barnbrook’s Little Book of Shocking Global Facts – they included a mention about my article about this subject ‘Worst graph design ever?‘.
They also took the opportunity to put down a marker for the September issue which will include an article by Nicholas Felton about visualisation design which should be a fascinating read.
I’m allowing a bit of self indulgence today as I celebrate 6 months of Visualising Data.
These first 6 months have seen a steady but satisfying growth in visitors, page views, subscribers and followers across the various ways of consuming my posts. Some of the key metrics used to track my site’s growth are strangely neat and tidy. Fans of the 6 times table will take pleasure from the knowledge that I am about to receive my 12,000th visitor (5000+ in July alone) and that this will be my 72nd post (12 posts per month feels about right). Also, this morning I ‘hit the jackpot’ with my 888th RSS subscriber. I’m still experiencing a slow trickle of facebook fans and twitter followers but that will come in due course hopefully.
I’d like to sincerely thank everybody who has taken the time to read my content and I hope you’ve found most of it interesting and useful. I already receive a fair bit of feedback but if there is any thing you wish to share or recommend for taking this blog forward do let me know.
Those of you accessing the site directly will now see a ‘popular posts’ widget in the sidebar from which you can navigate, funnily enough, to the most visited and read posts I’ve published so far. In terms of future ambitions around content, I was recently struck by a character named Jason who added his feedback to a post in Creative Review on which I’d also provided an early comment:
Become a whiney CR blog commenter in 3 easy steps:
1. Have a personal agenda which is more to do with bigging yourself up or a personal prejudice against the designer, throw in a couple of personal insults for good measure.
2. Link to your own blog or web site of your own utterly mediocre, commercial design, showing you neither have the commissions, intelligence or talent to comment.
3. Generally do absolutely nothing active or positive in the world of graphic design except sit on your fat arse and complain.
You are now an the typical CR commenter. Fact.
I’m not sure if this was targeted at me specifically, it might have been, but I have to say I was largely sympathetic to his overall sentiment “those who can, design, those who can’t, comment”. With this in mind I really want to look to increase the amount of personal examples of visualisation design I publish on the site, the opportunities for which haven’t been appropriate to date for differing reasons. I’ve also loads of plans for wide range of post ideas and topics over the next 6 months and am particularly excited about some of the insights articles that will be coming up.
Finally, I’m going to shamelessly finish off by promoting the wide range of consultancy, collaboration and training services that I offer. I am delighted to also announce that I have established a working collaboration with Remode Studios and am looking forward to a fruitful relationship in the future.
At the end of each month I pull together a collection of links to some of the most relevant, interesting and useful articles I’ve come across during the previous month. If you follow me on Twitter you will see many of these items tweeted as soon as I find them. Here’s the latest collection from July 2010:
Infographics News | Steve Duenes, Archie Tse and The New York Times infographics | Link
Huffington Post | Visualizing Hunger and Its Impact: Why we need a hunger data consortium | Link
New York Times | Behind the scenes of a live World Cup | Link
City University London | City University London helps local authority to better understand and inform its citizens | Here and here
Perceptual Edge | Stephen Few’s latest Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter “Coordinated highlighting in context: bringing multidimensional connections to light” | Link
Coroflot Portfolios | The fast, easy way to get your creative projects online and in front of the right people | Link
Brian Cray | Following up Jakob Nielsen’s “How little do users read?”, an interesting article about estimated reading time in web design | Link
The Scoop | How API’s help the NYT newsroom | Link
DataVisualization.ch | First article in Benjamin’s Datavisualization.ch Inside series, “How We Visualized 1 Billion Dollars” | Link
Guardian Datablog | David McCandless (Information is Beautiful) and other data experts accompany David Cameron in India | Link
School of Visual Arts | Overview of Data Visualisation by Shawn Allen (of Stamen Design) | Link
DataVis.ca | Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics and data visualisation | Link
Theusrus.de | Interesting visualisation challenge for communicating the comparison between expected and actual performance of the World Cup teams | Link
Eager Eyes | Multi-touch brushing for parallel coordinates | Link
Smashing Magazine | The Creative vs. the marketing team: Yin And yang, oil and water | Link
Harvard Business Review | The four phases of design thinking | Link
Drawar | The frustration of design and development | Link
Paul Graham | ‘The top idea in your mind’ describing the power of showers to aid the thinking process! | Link
Charman-Anderson | The value of data for readers and the newsroom | Link
Infosthetics | Top secret America: Visualizing the national security buildup in the US | Link
xocas.com | The making of NYT’s Mariano Rivera’s pitches | Link
Junk Charts | Yellow, green and polka dots – graphical analysis of the Tour de France | Link
Infosthetics | YouTube adds view tracking data visualization dashboard | Link
Creative Bits | The small world of Slinkachu | Link
New York Times | For today’s graduates, just one word: statistics | Link
Cincinnati.com | Data shaping store shelves – companies use new high-tech methods | Link
Wired | Japanese artist maps 1945-1998′s nuclear explosions | Link
Information Management | Open data hard to understand, says data.gov.uk chief | Link
Campus Technology | Weill Cornell 3D Cave Helps Researchers Visualize Data | Link
Wired | How Inception’s astonishing visuals came to life | Link
NAME | First in a series by Core77 about designers who have recently struck out on their own – first up, Stewart Smith, artist/programmer/designer | Link
Seth’s Blog | Information about information | Link
Visualization Blog | Data visualization talks online | Link
Infographics News | Murdoch’s strategy for making people pay for The Times online: Infographics | Link
Online Journalism Blog | An introduction to data scraping with Scraperwiki | Link
Design Mind | Presentation about sensemaking – the manner in which we make meaning during the design process | Link
Site Sketch 101 | The 35 most beautiful hand-drawn websites | Link
Creative Bits | Logo design narrative and brief form for clients | Link
Eager Eyes | Workshop: The Role of Theory in Information Visualization | Link
Core 77 | Christoph Gielens amazing overhead photos of our species and Joe Rogan on why were even here | Link
O’Reilly Radar | In defense of games in the workplace | Link
Smashing Magazine | Designing style guidelines for brands and websites | Link
This is a follow-up post to my first article in the Visualisation Insights series which I published last week. The purpose of this companion series is to optimise the learning opportunities from each insights article, reflecting on the ideas, issues and observations to emerge.
Why did I choose this subject?
As an avid football fan I’m afflicted with an addiction that compels me to digest the sport in as many different ways as possible. So when I came across Michael Deal’s wonderfully simple but innovative Umbro design I was instantly drawn to its potential as a great way of communicating the key incidents and the general ‘ebb and flow’ of the World Cup matches.
With my visualisation head on, I was intrigued to learn more about the background behind this design. I’m no different to a large majority of typical readers who are eager to learn how designers like Michael move from conception to execution, so I was delighted to receive such a generously thorough and interesting account of the process he went through in producing this work.
Impressions prior to the interview?
The factors that impressed me most about this design solution were the density of the data and the clarity of the resulting game patterns. Visualising football is no easy task, indeed visualising any sport in ways that bring new insight and understanding is hugely challenging, but I felt this was a really effective solution that demonstrated a similarity in approach to the spacial efficiency of Tufte’s small multiples and sparklines as well as Few’s bullet graph.
A measure of effectiveness of any infographic or visualisation is does it make the viewer feel smarter? – a random selection of some of the match graphics below highlights how it achieves this:
This was Spain’s first game and ended up being the first shock of the tournament as a constant barrage of Spanish passing and efforts on the Swiss defence was defeated by a single breakaway goal, one of the few efforts the Swiss had in a game during which they rarely strung two passes together but held on doggedly all the same.
This game represented the second major shock of the tournament and perfectly reveals the story of the game which saw New Zealand get an early goal and then spend the rest of the game defending for their lives with only two further attempts during the entire game. As evidenced by the prevalence of white space, there was little or no emphasis on accurate passing to achieve this draw, with the Italians pressurising the New Zealand goal throughout the game.
As you can see from the graphic above, Germany’s early goal catches Argentina by such surprise that it takes them until about 30 minutes to register their first shot. After this they have a fairly sustained period of pressure with many efforts on goal until Germany knock the stuffing out of them with three late goals.
This semi-final match shows how Spain’s intense passing accuracy seemed to paralyse the hitherto highly-effective German side. Eventually, after much patient play, this resulted in a goal midway through the second half. Thereafter, as the patterns reveal, the Spanish take on a more defensive approach with less emphasis on their normal impeccable inter-passing.
The World Cup Final was viewed as something of an anti-climax and a far worse spectacle than anticipated. The passing consistency, particularly of the Spanish, was largely lacking in a very disrupted and bitty encounter which became more about perspiration than inspiration until Iniesta’s late, great winner.
Impressions after the interview?
As with any visualisation challenge the effectiveness of the solution will be determined by how successfully the designer nails down the message, the data and the display within the given constraints of the project. I was very impressed by how Michael managed each one of these principle factors.
The great open brief from Umbro left the responsibility of the message to Michael and it is impressive how instinctively he arrived at the choice of the key variables and also the potential design format. The data was provided by Opta, which is a huge bonus, but this brought its own challenges through its sheer volume and complexity – Michael did well not to be tempted by all this data and be diverted from his objectives.
What I particularly liked about his approach was the way every visual attribute in the design was selected with deliberate intention. Producing any creative design like this is akin to arranging music – you need rhythm (in this case the consistency of each design layout, you only need to learn it once), you need some emphasis (such as the ‘fiery triumph’ of the buoyant red for goals scored) but not too much, and it needs offsetting with subtlety (the texture of the passing marks).
As Michael emphasised in his interview the time pressures he was facing during the production of this infographic restricted the amount of experimentation and iteration of design. The production process had to be practical and prompt in order to ensure the release was timely. It is with this context in mind that any recommendations for improvements have to be considered.
There are only two features I felt would have further improved the effectiveness of the designs without unnecessarily creating a great deal of extra process duration. To his credit, Michael identified both of these suggestions and explained their omission in his own reflections.
Firstly, I think the distinction between shots on target and off target is an important one, revealing a bit more detail about how close (or not) each team was to scoring with each attempt. To explain this take the England vs. Algeria game:
This was widely viewed as one of the worst games of the tournament yet you could draw from the frequent incidence of attempts that there was a reasonable amount of action, when in fact these efforts caused more trouble for supporters sat in the upper rows of the stands than it did the keepers. You could achieve distinction in detail by using two shades of blue or having filled and un-filled triangles.
The second enhancement would be to display a limited time-axis next to each graphic just to make it a bit easier to judge at what point in the game the different patterns or incidents occurred. At the moment there is only one time axis positioned above the first graphic. The axis would possibly only need to highlight the half-time mark as it is such an important junction within the game – you might expect to see tactical influences changing the pattern of the game thereafter. I can appreciate, however, from a production point of view that it would be complicated by the injury time played at the end of the first half, requiring the axis label to be shifted accordingly with each game.
Acknowledgement
Many thanks, once again, to Michael for his time and effort participating in this article. It has already been a massively popular post and I’m glad so many have been able to read these insights.
This was the first of many fascinating interviews I will be publishing in this insights series over the coming weeks and months. I will be covering the perspectives of more designers, practitioners, academics, bloggers, journalists and other visual thinkers to create a greater understanding and appreciation of the challenges, approaches and solutions that exist amongst the visualisation field’s ‘cast and crew’. If you’ve not already done so, there are many ways of consuming and receiving updates of each new post:
Finally, for those interested in learning more about the technical and design tactics behind producing visualisation work, there is another useful article here about the New York Times’ methodology for producing match analysis graphics like the one below. You’ll notice the timeline approach Michael took to display his data was also a small feature of this analysis, in this case just showing shots and goals.
This post is the first in a series I am commencing called Visualisation Insights. The purpose of this series is to provide readers with unique insights into the field of visualisation from the different perspectives of those in the roles of designer, practitioner, academic, blogger, journalist and all sorts of other visual thinkers. My aim is to bring together these interviews to create a greater understanding and appreciation of the challenges, approaches and solutions that exist in the worlds of this collection of people – the visualisation field’s ‘cast and crew’. I will be following each interview with a post reflecting on some of the key insights to emerge.
The World Cup is now but a distant memory to most of us, unless you happen to come from Spain of course, but one of the key aspects of the tournament from point of view was the array of innovative infographics and visualisation devices used by media organisations and websites to enhance their coverage (see my collections part 1, part 2 and part 3).
One of the most shared and discussed visualisation designs was conceived, designed and produced by New York designer Michael Deal on behalf of Umbro, the UK sportswear brand. Michael designed a novel, elegant and hugely insightful approach to visualising each of the 64 games based around three important statistics that help describe the ebb and flow of the game: completed passes, attempts on goal and goals scored. These designs were neatly compiled on to a single poster layout.
[click image for large view]
Hugely impressed by this design solution, which has strong themes of the layout and data density of Tufte’s sparklines and Few’s bullet graph, I invited Michael to impart his thoughts about the process he had gone through, the design decisions he had taken and the visualisation execution methods he had employed.
You can see more of Michael’s personal work at www.mikemake.com.
Michael, can you give me a brief outline of your background as a designer? Also, if possible, how would you describe your particular focus or expertise as a design (in terms of the sort of project you typically undertake/enjoy)?
I’m 23 years old and I’ve been practicing graphic design in New York City for almost a year, working now at Pentagram. I’m still figuring out what my dream projects might be but recently I’ve been enjoying visualizing data in custom, “hand-crafted” designs.
How would you describe your interest in football?
I’ve been playing on teams since I was in elementary school. It’s a sport I love to play and deeply respect.
How did you get involved in the Umbro project?
Umbro had seen my work and approached me a few months ago with the idea of creating infographics for the World Cup.
What was the brief you were given? Was it fairly open (“we need some visualisations about the World Cup”) or more specific (“we need visualisations about each match showing passing, attempts and goals”)?
It was much more the former. I wish all clients could be as fantastic as Umbro has been, specifically my contact there, Aaron Lavery. The brief was very open and we had a lot of great dialogue. They showed full trust in me as the designer, allowing me to explore any option I thought might work.
How did you arrive at the decision to visualise the variables you chose (ie. passing, attempts and goals)?
One of the main challenges of this project was to design the entire graphic before having the actual data, so that when the matches were played, I could plug the data in and get the graphic out the door right away. This approach ruled out taking more editorial angles where one might assess the matches that had been played and use infographics to highlight interesting aspects unique to this tournament. So the practical direction was to create an infographic that could potentially receive data from any given World Cup, which offered the exciting possibility to experiment with a graphic language for visualizing any given football match.
I was interested in presenting possession, and I realized that mapping successful passes would be an easy solution for conveying the ebb and flow of possession purely with data points. The charting of shots on goal functions in a similar way, while suggesting more about where the ball was on the field.
You mention the data is supplied by Opta, was this an arrangement already presented for you or did you source the data yourself?
Umbro had worked with Opta before, so this was a conveniently established relationship for me.
Did you have the opportunity to explore other aspects of the vast data sets Opta hold?
There were XML files of data for every match, which could sometimes exceed 10,000 lines of code, tracking nearly every detail of the gameplay, including x/y field coordinates and a timestamp for each piece of action. This degree of granularity can really make you geek out, with rabbit holes left and right you have to make sure to step over.
Can you briefly talk me through your data preparation process? What software/techniques did you use to handle the data and produce the analysis behind the visualisation?
I’m still experimenting with more automated means of handling and visualizing data like this, so in the interest of time, it was important for me to just get it all into the more comfortable form of a spreadsheet for each game. There seemed to be a number of PC applications that converted XML feeds to Excel spreadsheets (I used Advanced XML Converter), but I found nothing for Mac, so if anybody knows of something, let me know!
I then spent a good bit of time preparing a multi-table template in iWork’s Numbers that would isolate and reorder just the data I needed upon pasting the Excel output for each match.
How did you arrive at the concept of the display? What sort of alternative solutions were you considering?
I was almost certain that mini-timelines for each game would be the way to go. I wanted compact match visualizations that would fit together in as small a space as a legible reading of the data would allow. At first it was tempting to arrange the timelines in more of a tournament bracket formation, but they needed to share a space within the same eye-span to allow for immediate ease of comparison. This was a much higher priority than it was to highlight the paths of each team as easily as a tournament bracket diagram does.
I was particularly interested in clearly presenting games with discrepancies between the frequencies of the three variables—For example, games where one team dominates possession but just can’t get a score on the board.
From a process point of view, do you tend to sketch ideas out on paper first or go straight to the data/technology and try out different compositions/iterations?
In all other types of design, I sketch a lot by hand before anything else; with data visualization, the framework of the design is usually fleshed out enough in my head to jump right in and get a proof of concept to make sure the imagined design works. In this case, that framework was generally a set of small, stackable timelines that contained different variables from a football match in the same shared space. I knew from the beginning that it would eventually work, but the number of Adobe Illustrator sketches I made to refine the final shapes for the visualization language is almost comical, with a file filled with dozens of iterations of these little timelines.
Can you explain some of the deliberate decisions you made around the visual properties in the design?
For the three event types charted in the timelines, a higher frequency of each generally indicates one team outplaying another for that respective variable, but there’s a hierarchy to the importance of each variable (the frequency ultimately being more crucial for goals than for shots than for passes). The shapes and colors representing these three variables needed to be appropriately weighted to maintain this hierarchical balance between the events.
The pass rectangles needed to fall back as the main texture of possession in the match, over which the more heavily weighted shot triangles were mapped in a darker color. The triangle was chosen for this variable because it conveys a sharp strike, the impact of a shot on goal. Successful goal circles were mapped at a higher position above the upward-pointing triangles to allow them to stand out, while conveying the upward progression in the importance of these gameplay events.
I chose a buoyant red circle for this variable to suggest (as far as one reasonably could in this case) the fiery triumph and ecstasy that comes packaged with any goal scored in the World Cup. The circle has its universal connotations of transcendental perfection and all that, and I gave it as saturated a red as possible.
I never would have guessed that such semi-philosophical abstractions would enter my design process for data visualizations, but I will welcome them anytime they feel like showing up again in the future. It was fun to think about Kandinsky’s Bauhaus ideal of the role of the circle, triangle, and square as part of a reductive universal visual script. It was also nice to get lost in the timelines as little landscapes painted with game data, with green trees, blue hills, and red suns. It definitely had me craving some Super Mario Bros action.
…and my answer to this question has officially become way too self-indulgent.
One of the key aspects of any creative process is knowing when to stop adding or subtracting from the design: how did you handle this delicate stage of the project?
It was tempting to include things like subtle time measures and tick marks throughout the piece, but I didn’t want the viewer getting hung up on that. It’s all meant to be more about comparing the general patterns within and between the games rather than being able to discern the exact minute that a goal was scored.
The shape of the timelines had enough order in their grid layout that I didn’t need any kind of framing lines or boxes, which was very liberating. If the timelines within each column don’t appear to align properly, it only appears this way because I left out all extra framing elements. It’s purely data points and country labels.
At some point in the process I was designing the timelines with data for fouls and penalties, and it was a tough decision at first to exclude it because it was definitely interesting stuff. However, as a gameplay event, it was in a separate category from the stepwise set of passes, shots, and goals, and it was steering the graphic in a different direction from what I was intending. Also, the immediate decipherability of a three-variable chart just isn’t as strong with a fourth element introduced.
What software did you use to create the designs? What features of this software did you use to create the intricate displays? For example, did you use scripting in Illustrator to automate the task of plotting the instance of passes?
I actually didn’t use any scripting in Illustrator. I copy/pasted scatterplots from Numbers into Illustrator, used the “convert to shape” effect a lot, and relied heavily on Illustrator’s Smart Guides. It was essentially built “by hand” with the spreadsheet-created charts as precise blueprints for locking the shapes in place. This is obviously a time-consuming approach, but it offered me absolute control over the entire graphic.
Of course any design brief could be delivered in many different ways, but, on reflection, is there anything you would wish to change, add or remove to this design?
I’m actually pretty satisfied with the way this piece came out. If I hadn’t been working under such time constraints, however, it would have been very interesting to see how it would have looked with the height of the green passing bars representing the length of the pass. This might have revealed some insights about the varying playing and passing styles of different teams.
I’d also be curious to see an alternate version with “unfilled” outlines of the blue shot triangles to represent off-target shots, differentiating them from solid triangles for on-target shots. Again, it was a matter of time constraints and keeping it simple.
Like football, in the way every fan thinks he can do better than the manager (like me), design naturally has its own armchair experts (probably, again, like me!) – have you received any suggestions or comments that you thought represented good ideas?
Flaneuse from contexts.org wrote a very thorough and insightful review of my visualization, and had a great suggestion about including the win/loss point values accumulated by each team advancing past the Group Stage. It can be a confusing system to keep track of if your team is in a tight situation and you want to look ahead at what hypothetical tournament outcomes would be necessary for your team to advance. There would have been a way to make this work, it just didn’t make it into the final piece.
As a result of this work, do you have any “unfinished business”/burning ambition to pursue further football related visualisations?
I would love to continue to create visualizations for football, and other sports too. There’s so much to be done.
There are often limits to what you can deduce through numbers and charts, but with the rich datasets in sports, those borders are more distant. With the universal passion you see for sports, the continuing development of in-game data-tracking methods, and the broadening mainstream application of data visualization, it won’t be long before the presence of infographics will be ingrained in our conception of how sports footage and analysis is presented in the media—much more than they are right now. We’ll be seeing more infographics in-game and on SportsCenter.
How challenging did you find the task of creating a visualisation for football compared to some of the other design subjects/briefs you have been involved in?
Being so familiar with the subject, while brainstorming ideas I could imagine myself on the field and in the action, which is an advantage you don’t always have with projects where you’re learning a lot about the subject along the way. It’s a bit cheesy, but it definitely helped. Another advantage was that a lot of other World Cup visualizations were coming out as I was designing this, and it was easy to see what was and wasn’t working.
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Many thanks to Michael for his detailed, candid and insightful thoughts and also for his time in participating in this post. I wish him all the success for the future.
Further to yesterday’s post about the Wikileaks Afghanistan War Logs, the Guardian datablog has published a post today describing how their data journalism operation worked. This reveals some interesting insights into the way the investigation team went about handling, analysing and interpreting all this data in order to unearth and present the key stories.
I’ve played about with some of this data in Tableau Public to see if I can unearth some interesting visualisations and also to test out the data/software in this environment. I’ve embedded a sample of them below for sharing (please note they do take a while to load up):
This first graph simply plots all types of casualty on a common scale across the 6 year period so that you get a feel for the relative levels for each category as well as any particular patterns within each year. As with all these graphs, the context of the timeline of military strategy, troop numbers and other milestone information would help explain or inform some of these patterns.
In contrast to the first graph, this second one plots all casualities on a single line graph. The approach here is to accept the noise created by the largely overlapping lines towards the bottom of the graph because you can then easily identify unusual peaks such as the huge increase in Taliban casualties particularly during Aug/Sep 2006 and Aug/Sep 2007. It is also clear to see the overall increasing bloodiness of the war over time.
This third graph plots a cumulative picture of casualty numbers by type, clearly revealing the far greater numbers of Taliban casualties. It is really interesting to see the close proximity of Civilian and Afghan forces casualties throughout the course of the war – this graph shows this far better than the individual monthly patterns of the second graph.
This final graph is a heat map used to try and draw out seasonal patterns behind casualty numbers. I decided to use dual encoding for casualty levels with the size of the square and its colour both representing the data count. I felt this helped emphasise patterns more clearly than having just one. Note that the colour and size scales representing different values/maximums in each graph – these ranges are normalised to help comparison of the intensity levels rather than the absolute counts of casualty under each category. As shown in the second graph, you can clearly see an upsurge in activity around the late summer/early autumn periods, particularly in recent years. Casualty levels seem strangely low for the winter and spring months?
These initial graphs above (the map boundaries haven’t come out particularly well compared to how they looked when created) show firstly the total deaths and secondly the total woundings by location during the 6 year period. Its particularly interesting to see the prominence of locations of deaths or woundings around the highways of Afghanistan, as you would expect given the roadside IED tactics.
The second lot of graphs are small multiples of the death and wounding incidents plots (1) across the 6 year period and (2) by the nature of the event.
This final graphs presents a monthly and yearly plot of deaths and woundings by category of victim and I think it does offer some interesting patterns. Overall these visualisations probably don’t bring a great deal of added insight compared to the original Guardian visualisations, although I think the exercise has served as a good test of the tool as a means for exploring such data.
300 Key Incidents
I tried a few combinations using this data but nothing can really improve on the map interface the Guardian created for this data and, given this is just a manual selection of key events, any statistical or trend analysis will be flawed. I did a wordle word cloud analysis to see if there were any interesting trends on repeated terms but the data contains so much coded language and has references that distort such analysis.
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Paul Bradshaw on the Online Journalism Blog reports that “French data journalism outfit Owni have put together an impressive app (also in English) that attempts to put a user-friendly interface on the intimidating volume of War Logs documents.”
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The Atlantic website has joined in the task of visualising the data, presenting a range of map based analysis for the IED data.
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Nathan at FlowingData has published a guest post by Alastair Dant, interactive lead at the Guardian, describing the efforts that went into designing the war logs map of incidents revealed by Wikileaks.
The New York Times, the Guardian (UK) and Der Spiegel (Ger) have published details of a huge set of war logs from the whistleblowing website Wikileaks, detailing the war in Afghanistan.
There are many aspects to the journalistic challenges facing these organisations who have been selected and trusted by Wikileaks to handle the responsibility of publicising this story and making sense of the data.
The volume and breadth of data to work through, the complexity of the emerging stories, the responsibility for accurate and sensitive reporting (NYT’s note to readers) and visualisation devices required to effectively present these stories are just some of the demands being placed on the various journalists and design experts who will have been carefully deployed to handle this story.
I concede that I know little about Der Spiegel’s track record with interactives, infographics and other visualisations but the first two are well established (and repeatedly recognised by awards) as being two of the most capable media organisations in respect of the use of information displays to enhance their reporting. I’ve yet to see the reasoning behind Wikileaks selecting these three – I’m sure its based on their political leanings – but I would imagine their reputation for data journalism, their ability to draw insight and impart robust data-stories will have been prominent factors.
A New Age of Journalism
Stepping away from the subject matter reveals a fascinating demonstration of the practice of data journalism, as acknowledged by the Guardian themselves here and in their live blog, an excerpt of which states:
With the number of documents released, many have, understandably, struggled to reach an instant verdict on how significant the information is. But media commentators have been quick to see the significance of the way the information was released for future models of journalism.
One example is Jay Rosen’s blog for New York University and another is Alexis Madrigal’s blog on the Atlantic. Madrigal describes the publication of the documents as “a milestone in the new news ecosystem”, and writes of:
“new conduits … opened into the most highly regarded newsrooms in the country. In the new asymmetrical journalism, it’s not clear who is on what side or what the rules of engagement actually are. But the reason WikiLeaks may have just changed the media is that we found out that it doesn’t really matter. Their data is good, and that’s what counts.”
Visualisations (Last updated 27/07/10)
Here are the visualisations produced so far by The Guardian and Der Spiegel. It is interesting that there is nothing yet to emerge from the New York Times. There could be three reasons for this 1) taking their time to produce a fantastic interactive, 2) they have decided to keep their coverage limited to written prose, 3) they have an agreement with the other organisations to leave the inforgraphics work to them. Who knows?
A series of charts by Jeremy Christopher depicting the history, worth and composition of the FTSE 100 share index have been doing the rounds over the past 24 hours (first seen via DataVisualization.ch). The image below is probably the most discussed and shared of this short series of 3 charts. It visualises the FTSE’s index rate for every month over the past 26 years and also shows the changing profile of the industries comprising the 100 most highly capitalised UK companies.
Radial plots are certainly a popular visual device right now (there were several examples in my ‘Visualising the World Cup‘ series) but they are also one of the more contentious visual design choices, certainly amongst purists.
The focus of debate normally surrounds the suitability of plotting a variable (or variables in the case of the similar radar graphs) about a circular axis. Time, however, is a measure that does lend itself to a radial presentation. A logical alternative could have been to disconnect the circle and stretch out the sequence along a traditional left-to-right horizontal layout. However, the compatible layout and proportions offered by a circular display like this (especially when you are trying to comply with the dimensions of ISO paper size formats like A1) is a perfectly understandable choice – it does provide the means to achieve a great deal of data density.
I think this is a wonderfully elegant design, it appeals aesthetically, engages me for a prolonged period and fundamentally communicates the message it was intending – that of the shifting story of the FTSE. There are just a few minor design choices I would have taken differently:
The colour scheme used to depict the different industries is pleasing on the eye but offers only very subtle changes between sector which makes it difficult to accurately judge the shifting profile. There is clearly a designer’s desire to minimise the spectrum of colours to sustain the look and feel this diagram achieves but an increase in the distinction between shades would be good.
The bars going around the outer band, depicting index rate, create a bit of a moire effect – unintended visual noise. A solution to this would be to reduce the gaps between each bar. Currently, this space looks to be set at 100% of the bar width, so something closer to 25% might prevent the effect.
The gradient grey shading in the background of these outer bars is the only ink on the design not encoding a piece of data and, in my view, reduces some of the clarity of these bars. It appears the main function of this shading is to emphasise white major/minor grid lines to help with reading the index value. Perhaps the shading could be removed entirely or at least reduced to a very soft shade of grey and, instead, a subtle but stronger shade of grey used for the grid lines.
The San Francisco Chronicle presents a visualisation developed by Alan Mislove, a researcher at Northwestern University. His study looks at 300 million tweets measuring mood based on the sentiment of the language used. The results are then plotted according to location and time of day. Finally, the volume of tweets are represented by the area of the state in question:
I’ve not seen a visualisation attempted like this before, with the size of regions pulsing to reflect the changing size of a given variable, in this case the volume of tweet. However, I don’t think it works that well at communicating the results or allowing us to explore some of the patterns of data. The coastal bulges are quite interesting but the constant distortion of the country and the states within vastly reduces the chance of drawing insight.
This work prompted me to consider some of the alternative approaches that to plotting multivariate data around issues of geography and time. The following recent examples show possible ideas though, in some cases, they would involve sacrificing the volume of tweets variable.
This technique maps 3D elevations to represent the location and prevalence of various crimes on San Francisco. A similar approach could have been applied to the entire US map and the peaks colour coded to represent the mood language and sized to represent volume of tweets. Animated over time these peaks would then grow and shrink accordingly.
This work plots concepts of new city landscapes based on terrain altitudes representing the volume of twitter activity and styled using a classic cartography look and feel. The colour coding here represents the peaks and so this would in principle change the visualisation of happiness, with volume having to be sacrificed and the height used to represent extent of happiness.
The much celebrated work of Hans Rosling, where multiple variables are plotted over time and by geographical position could be an alternative option, still allowing the use of colour to represent the mood and size of bubbles to show volume of tweets.
Similar to the concept of Gapminder but rather than bubbles being plotted over the mid point of countries, here the bubbles are the representations of the geography of each country, growing and shrinking in size over time. This may result in a similarly unsatisfying solution though, as the true geography becomes distorted and therefore hard to interpret.
The second representation idea to come from the NYT is the interactive visualisation of the Superbowl and the twitter ‘chatter’ that took place leading up to, during and after the game. This approach plots selected twitter terms across the country over time, growing the size of the text depending on its volume. This perhaps wouldn’t be most suited for the happiness plot for which the values are derived from syntax but not represented by it.
The final technique to consider, once again inspired by an example in the NYT, would sacrifice the volume of tweets variable and simply plot the happiness ‘index’ directly on to the specific locations across the map. The animation would show the changing levels across the states without distorting the geographical accuracy.
It is always nice to see experimental visualisation approaches being adopted to find new ways of communicating qualitative data, especially multivariate data of this nature. Regardless of whether they succeed, it is still extremely valuable work to help further the field overall through better understanding and experience of technique application.
In my recent post ‘Worst graph design ever?’ I provided a very brief review of the ‘The Little Book of Shocking Global Facts’. As the title suggests, this took a critical view of the appropriateness and effectiveness of the design choices made to represent the facts covered.
Clarifying my position
Over the past week there has been a great buzz about this book’s release and its probably fair to say a majority have followed a similar opinion to my own, indeed my post has been referred to on quite a few sites. To be fair there have also been staunch defenders of the work so it is important to acknowledge the presence of two sides of the debate. In some cases my opinions have been classified as representing ‘anti-Barnbrook” sentiment and so I wanted to clarify my position.
As far as I’m concerned I have absolutely no anti-Barnbrook feelings, I am simply anti-poor visualisation. I’ve only had passing exposure to Jonathan Barnbrook but it is clear he polarises opinion. That is perfectly normal and expected in a graphic design context where judgements are formed with greater emphasis on the creativity and novelty (by which I mean ‘newness’ rather than gimmickry) of visual presentation. Issues of taste and aesthetic are largely the currency of the debate in this field.
I see things from the slightly different visualisation world rather than the pure graphic design perspective. I therefore judge designs on their ability to effectively and clearly communicate or to enable a reader to explore data in an engaging and useful way. Forming opinions based on the function of clear communication should not be taken to imply that innovation and creativity have no place in visualisation. That is simply not the case. Some supporters of the Barnbrook designs have drawn fearful comparison with a dreaded alternative design approach based on dense numbers and formal statistics and the use of dry, mainstream fonts like Ariel or Times New Roman. Are these the only design possibilities for presenting data? To offer such a binary ‘this or that’ view of the potential of visualisation design is extremely blinkered. But let’s remember that this book is about communicating facts and so creativity in design must aid the communication effect, not impair it.
A response from the designers
DigitalArts have published an interview with Barnbrook designer, Jon Abbott, who offers his views on the research and creative processes as well as the design solutions produced.
The article’s introduction presents an interesting context, particularly in light of the resulting design:
The sheer scale of some of the environmental and social challenges facing the world today can be difficult to wrap your mind around – the amount of data and the massive numbers involved can often seem impenetrable. In The Little Book of Shocking Global Facts, Barnbrook… has cut an experimental line between type art and infographics that allows you to engage with them without robbing them of their power.
With these observations in mind I maintain my belief that the designs fail to achieve such objectives. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions from here but will present what I consider to be the most interesting exchange in this interview:
DA: How do you use design and typography to make statistics engaging and make sense of incomprehensibly large numbers?
JA: “Aesthetically, our intention was not to create an almanac of information design, but a diverse, fun, richly illustrated book that the reader would want to pick up again and again. We thought that 192 pages of numbers and statistics presented in a formal way could have been slightly dull, so we set about creating something which we thought would be visually stimulating for the reader. We wanted to avoid any visual clichés; some of the numbers are presented in a seemingly abstract way, but all the illustrations have their root in the fact which they are representing.”
DA: How how do you stop the design from detracting from the information?
JA: “There have been accusations levelled at the book that our experimental approach impedes the communication of information. Most of the statistics are supported with some explanatory information and it is presented clearly albeit sometimes in an unusual fashion.
“Our belief is that a book which is quickly digested is quickly forgotten. I would argue the reader deserves more credit than that, and I think people are willing to take the time to delve into a complex illustration again and again.”
At the end of each month I pull together a collection of links to some of the most relevant, interesting and useful articles I’ve come across. If you follow me on Twitter you will see these items tweeted as soon as I find them. Here’s the latest collection from June 2010:
Online Journalism Review(from May 2007) | An interview with Alberto Cairo, El Mundo’s former infographics expert, about his (then) upcoming book on visual journalism | Link
Smashing Magazine | Interesting background behind the design of a “World Of Programming” Infographic | Link
If It Was My Home | Visualisation which plots the spill area of the BP Oil Disaster over your chosen location, helping to contextualise the extent of this disaster | Link
Juice Analytics | Summary page of Juice’s excellent ’30 days to context connection’ series about the world of visualisation | Link
The Guardian | From the Guardian’s News & Media Sustainability Report 2010 – “our data journalism is opening up a world of information” | Link
The Guardian (from Oct 2009) | Portugal’s new paper points to print’s future | Link
Online Journalism Blog | Video with Olympics Reporter Ollie Williams to find out what the BBC are planning for 2012 | Link
Perceptual Edge | Business Intelligence Industry – Get to Know Your Real Customers | Link
blprnt.blg(from Apr 2010) | Your Random Numbers – getting Started with Processing and Data Visualization | Link
Logo My Way | Logo redesign challenge for BP in light of the oil disaster | Link
Online Journalism Blog | Alternative critique of The Guardian’s crusade for liberating access to all data, looking at the economics of data in the news environment | Link
Haha.nu | Good Magazine | There’s been a few lows recently in terms of bad design, here are a couple more to digest | Example 1 and Example 2
The Guardian | Why Minority Report was spot on | Link
Data Mining | Visualizing wireless signals in Augmented Reality | Link
Visuale | 8 simple rules on brainstorming around a visualization design | Link
Smashing Magazine | Applying Interior Design principles to the web | Link
Eager Eyes | Article reflecting on the demise of the visualisation website ‘Verifiable’ | Link
Wired | Article to launch the availability of UK tube data – ‘Live Tube map shows the power of TfL’s data’ | Link
Infosthetics | Recreating Minard’s Napoleon graph using modern day tools: Swivel, Tableau and Many Eyes | Link
Infosthetics | Interview with Karim Rashid about Information Aesthetics in Industrial Design| Link
New York times | The New York Times visualisation which tracks the extent and spread of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill | Link
Core77 | Don Norman’s article about design thinking being a useful myth | Link
CBS Money Watch | The 10 hottest careers in the US| Link
Kickstarter | A new way to fund and follow creativity | Link
Moritz Stefaner | Open source release of Moritz Stefaner’s brilliant Elastic Lists code | Link
Design Mind | How designers are introducing the idea of “simple” to a group of high school students | Link
Perceptual Edge | ‘Circle lust continues’ – article bemoaning the ongoing love affair some visualisation designers have with the use of the circle | Link
Infosthetics | Interview with Nicholas Felton from feltron.com | Link
Eager Eyes | Caroline Ziemkiewicz and Robert Kosara’s paper on ‘Implied Dynamics in Information Visualization’ | Link
Infosthetics | Social Visualization Software Review: Tableau Public | Link
Juice Analytics | Can familiarity trump usability? | Link
Infographics News | Three infographics and 200 years of Argentinian history | Link
Infographics News | Four visual communicators give advice on infographics | Link
Flowing Data | Review of the book Data Flow 2 | Link
Infosthetics | What is the best arrow representation in visualisations? | Link
Flowing Data | Ridiculous but good fun, a Twitter parade in your honour | Link
Flowing Data | Turning information into action – 10 Tactics| Link
Smashing Magazine | Why design-by-committee should die | Link
O’Reilly Radar | Data is not binary: Why open data requires credibility and transparency | Link
I have spoken recently about the status of the world of visualisation and how the juxtaposition of a number of factors is really facilitating its growth and popularity, but not yet widespread best practice. One of the key elements in this emergence has been the modern day pursuit for transparency and open access to data which is growing at a rapid pace and is being rewarded with positive action.
We are seeing great progress in this area, and where once we had a trickle, there is now something of a deluge. Government data sites like data.gov (US) and data.gov.uk (UK), the COINS database of UK treasury spending, the Guardian’s datablog, the imminent release of data around UK local government spending and the highly popularTransport for London river, bus and tube data are just some of the examples of this movement.
Accompanying this growing access to important and interesting data comes a great opportunity, responsibility and demand to provide effective visualisation services that act as a window for any interested person or party to be able to explore, make sense of and make use of these great resources.
I recently came across some more of the visualisation services launched in the US such as Recovery.gov, USAspending.gov and the Federal IT Portfolio. Yet, whilst they are a great step in the right direction making the information accessible to a much wider audience, there are things nagging away at me about some of the basic flaws that exist in the design of these services.
Great Expectations
Back in March it was announced Edward Tufte had been appointed on to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. This was met with great anticipation within the visualisation community, giving greater prominence to someone like that could only serve to promote and enhance the profile and good practice of the discipline:
Presumably, Tufte will be using his expertise to find charts that illustrate how the stimulus is being used, and what effect its having on the economy. That’s brilliant news, for anyone overwhelmed by the blather surrounding political debates. And it’s not just a token appointment. Tufte says that he’ll be going to Washington several days a month, and teleworking regularly. “Infographics Win! Obama Appoints Data-Viz Demigod to Chart the Stimulus”, Fast Company, 8th March 2010
I concede that my knowledge of the US government is largely informed by the West Wing and so I don’t fully understand the relationships between and alignment of the various councils, departments, panels and bodies. Furthermore, I’m unclear about the role of the department that appears responsible for delivering the spending sites (Chief Information Officer’s Council) nor entirely clear about the potential scope or reach of Tufte’s appointment. However, whilst there are certainly good things amongst these services (eg. the use of gapminder works well) there is a distinct lack of evidence that he has had any design input or influence:
The inelegant design of much of the above (especially the ugly tree map and indecipherable USA Spending categorical colour scheme) and the presence of devices like 3D pie charts and gauges does not evoke the Tufte principles many of us take great influence from.
Furthermore, when you hear that the development of the visualisation service for IT spending portfolio cost a total of $8M you start to see it in a new light, especially when you see this summary comment from the same people who were applauding the Data-Viz demigod’s appointment:
Of course, a sophisticated Web site of this magnitude doesn’t come cheap, but it is certainly easy to use… In this case, USASpending.gov’s IT Dashboard is $0.1 million under budget, ahead of schedule by 1.3%, and has an overall rating of 7.5. And the cost to create the USASpending.gov? $8 million, with the dashboard itself costing $1.3 million to build. For this kind of high-tech transparency, I think it’s absolutely worth it. Fast Company article, 14th July 2010
I’m sure I’ll receive feedback criticising my pedantry with this post but surely we would have expected better?
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Of course, a sophisticated Web site of this magnitude doesn’t come cheap, but it is certainly easy to use… In this case, USASpending.gov’s IT Dashboard is $0.1 million under budget, ahead of schedule by 1.3%, and has an overall rating of 7.5. And the cost to create the USASpending.gov? $8 million, with the dashboard itself costing $1.3 million to build. 
