Before we had D3 and all this fancy web technology, interactive news pieces on the web were usually built using Adobe Flash. Since the demise of Flash, they have all been broken, but now the NY Times has added a web-based Flash player to their archives so they can be experienced again in all their interactive glory!
An opinion piece in the New York Times last week got a lot of attention in visualization circles for its use of a spiral chart as its opener. While the choice of chart and color scheme can be debated, I want to discuss the fact that the spiral is disconcertingly off-center.
How do you make people not just see numbers when looking at a chart, but feel something? This chart of the number of deaths during the Iraq war has always given me a visceral response like no other, and it’s still as powerful as when it was made almost ten years ago. So I made a chart appreciation video to explain what I think is so great about it.
Dots fly across the screen, some of them moving up, some down. They represent black and white boys, and how their income differs from that of their parents and from each other. It's a great way to show this data in an engaging way and without having to explain percentiles. This is a chart appreciation.
Line charts – they're not the most glamorous. And yet, they can be used to tell a compelling story about global warming. In this video, I talk about what I consider a modern classic of data journalism, What's Really Warming the World by Eric Roston and Blacki Migliozzi: how it works, how it's structured, and why it works so well.
Time to breathe new life into my little YouTube channel, which I'm calling eagereyesTV. I'm doing so with the start of a new series I'm calling Chart Appreciation. Each episode will be on one particular visualization, news piece, or interactive. As the first one, I picked Hannah Fairfield's Driving Safety, in Fits and Starts from 2012.
At IEEE VIS this year, we're organizing the third Workshop on Visualization for Communication, also known as VisComm. The deadline is July 16, so still plenty of time to put together a paper, whether on communicating around COVID-19 or not. We're not only looking for the usual academic research, but also visual case studies, which means work by journalists, designers, or non-profits.
Annotations are what set visual communication and journalism apart from just visualization. They often consist of text, but some of the most useful annotations are graphical elements, and many of them are very simple. One type I have a particular fondness for is the diagonal reference line, which has been used to provide powerful context in past news pieces, and is making a comeback in the COVID-19 charts.
You may not be aware that we’re organizing the Visualization for Communication (VisComm) workshop at VIS again this year. That’s why we’ve decided to push back the deadline to July 15, so you can submit all your amazing research papers, position papers, posters, and visual case studies.
Criticizing visualizations is a cottage industry of sorts, and an activity I have indulged in in the past as well. Redesigning those charts is also not uncommon, though it's usually other people's charts, and that isn't always welcome. Sarah Leo of The Economist has redesigned some of the charts made by that publication, and not only do her redesigns work better, her thoughts around some of the design issues are also very insightful.
I'm not generally a fan of year-end lists, but they do provide a great way to see many fantastic pieces of work in one place. And if a simple list already does that, what might a list of lists do? Check out Maarten Lambrecht's List of 2018 Visualization Lists to find out!
When maps are used to display data, there is often a discrepancy between the data being shown, which almost never relates to area, and the area of the different parts of the map. This is particularly common in election maps. This new map of votes in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election cleverly combines geography and data in a clear and compelling way.
Showing when and where natural disasters like hurricanes are going to cause damage is not just a question of aesthetics – it is literally a matter of life and death. The traditional way hurricane forecasts are shown has a number of problems, but are the alternatives actually better?
The end of the year is always a good time to look back at the great work done in the world of news graphics – and this year in particular, to relive all the heartbreak and disillusionment. Here is a list of year-end news graphics round-ups for your enjoyment and edification.
Would you make a bar chart where the length of the bar doesn't actually scale with the number being shown? Would you draw a line chart with the lines all over the place, not where the values actually are? Of course not. Yet somehow, every single election map works like that.
Our World in Data looks at a wide variety of data about the world: health, population, energy, growth, inequality, etc. Max Roser and his colleagues dig through the vast amounts of open data to find many interesting connections and insights.
News articles are an incredibly important source of historical information. Online media and interactive pieces are much more at risk of breaking or disappearing, at least in theory. Well, it's not just theory. A quick look around shows a number of even fairly recent pieces in major publications that are broken today.
Mona Chalabi has one of the most interesting Instagram feeds for people interested in data visualization. She draws data by hand. It's interesting data, too, and her approach is accessible and inspiring.
The history of data journalism goes back much farther than most people assume. Long before computers or punch cards, and before even the first newspapers the way we know them today, data was being published. ProPublica's Scott Klein has been digging up a lot of interesting history.
A bit late, but here are links to a few round-ups of graphical journalism work from last year. These are always worth a look, no matter what time of year.
Kaiser Fung doesn't like this graphic that accompanied a recent story about the bird flu in the Wall Street Journal. His redesign shows a lot less overlap and a lot more detail; so much, in fact, that it obscures the point of the chart.
Lena Groeger (of ProPublica) has written a beautiful piece about the Power of Wee Things. She talks about using small things, multiples, and units to display data and get people interested. The article goes through many, many examples covering many different areas and ideas. She also gave a great talk on the topic at OpenVis 2014.
Scott Klein of ProPublica has written a great story about an early use of data in journalism, and Horace Greeley, the colorful journalist behind it. Greeley found an issue and then gathered the data to show the extent of the problem. This is not unlike today.
When visualizing data, we often strive for efficiency: show the data, nothing else. But there can be tremendous value in redundancy to make a point and drive it home. Two recent examples from news graphics illustrate this nicely.
In the past, it used to be difficult to find news graphics from the main news organizations. In the last few years, they have started to post year-end lists of their work, which are always a treat to walk through. With the new year a few weeks behind us, this is a good time to look at these as collections of news graphics.
The BizWeekGraphics tumblr (well worth following in general) has a series of postings with a beautiful collection of graphics from the very early days of Businessweek, and also some more recent ones.
In his keynote at IEEE VIS in Paris two months ago, Alberto Cairo talked about journalism, visual explanations, and what makes a good news visualization. But mostly, he talked about curiosity.
There are many charts I hate, because they're badly done, sloppy, meaningless, deceiving, ugly, or for any number of other reasons. But then there are the ones I keep coming back to because they're just so clear, well-designed, and effective. All of these are a few years old. Like a fine wine analogy that I could insert here, it probably takes a while for a chart to come up again and again in conversation and when looking for examples to realize how good it is.
Is a data journalist one who unearths the data, who finds the insights in the data, who finds the right way to visually communicate the data? The answer is, of course, all three. But let's tease them apart and look at each separately.
Raw numbers are easy to report and analyze, but without the proper context, they can be misleading. Is the effect you're seeing real, or a simple result of the underlying, obvious distribution? Too many analyses and news stories end up reporting things we already know.
It's so simple it feels entirely trivial: bars in a bar chart pointing down instead of up. But the effect can be striking. And it's not as obvious when to show downward-pointing bars as it might seem.
A clever chart redesign last week got a lot of people talking about which one is “right.” What is more interesting to me is not which one is (supposedly) the better representation of the truth, but which purpose each one serves.
Infographics today are mostly pointless decorations around a few simple facts that add nothing meaningful. But information graphics once deserved their name with dense, meticulously-drawn, well-researched information. Here is an example from 1944.
I'm not a fan of video. I don't spend time randomly surfing YouTube, and when given the choice between reading an article and watching a video, I'll read. The reason is that videos often don't work well for me: they're too fast or too slow, they take a long time to get to the point, they don't let me skip around and browse easily. I'd rather be in control than having the information pre-packaged for me. But two examples have surfaced in the last few days that show data visualization can tell a very effective story in well-designed, well-paced videos.
One of the many things Malofiej 20 made me wonder about is how we present data and what we expect from such a presentation. Very often, we essentially narrate the process of discovery, but is that really the best way? And how much data do we need to show when making a point? Just because we start out with lots of data does not mean we really need to show it all.
How does the New York Times Graphics Department produce the fantastic work that wins so many awards? To get a taste of the secret sauce, all you need to do is track down their Twitter accounts and blogs, where they openly share sketches and talk about process. Here is a guide.
As newspaper graphics go, scatterplots are a fairly advanced technique. They tend to show a reasonably large amount of data as single points, and they require the reader to have an idea what to look for. Most newspapers never bother using scatterplots for that reason, which is really too bad. With some explanation, a scatterplot can be a very effective means of displaying data, and in particular to allow the user to drill into the data a little bit.
Malofiej was an exhausting week with many great conversations, fascinating insights, and great company. My sleep-deprived and jet-lagged brain is buzzing with things to write about, and this is only the first of several articles about or inspired by Malofiej. I start with a discussion on why I think The New York Times did so well this year, and what other newspapers can do to catch up.
Among the papers that stood out at InfoVis 2011 were two that shared an author, and that were presented in the same session by the same person: Jessica Hullman. These papers were Benefitting InfoVis with Visual Difficulties (with Eytan Adar and Priti Shah) and Visualization Rhetoric: Framing Effects in Narrative Visualization (with Nicholas Diakopoulos).
At their best, information graphics can be informative, exciting, and attractive. At their worst, they can be misleading, overdesigned, and empty. Infographics are still in their infancy, with a lot of untapped potential. Ideas from visualization can help figure out a future that is much more exciting.
As we're heading towards elections again, there is a chart type that is as unavoidable as political ads, baby-kissing, and smear campaigns: line charts showing polling data. The most common pitch two candidates against each other, and often make a big deal out of the fact that the lines cross. Not only are these charts misleading in the way they depict the choice, they also hide an important fact: the number of undecided voters.
Some of the most exciting work in our field is done by up-and-coming doctoral students, post-docs, and junior faculty members. In a new semi-regular series, I will highlight some of the people whose work I find particularly interesting and promising. The goal is to get their names onto people's radars earlier than this would have otherwise happened, in particular for those individuals who don't make a lot of noise about their work.
Information graphics (infographics) have gotten a bad rep lately because of a sudden wave of badly designed, uninformative graphics. But when they are done right, infographics can be both highly informative and enjoyable to look at and discover. Here are a few recent examples to demonstrate that.
The New York Times' new Visualization Lab uses IBM's Many Eyes technology. While it provides easy access to a wealth of visualization techniques and the possibility to comment, there is one major difference: only data provided by the NY Times can be used. The kind and quality of that data will determine the success of this new site.
A story is making the rounds recently that the Obama campaign has received many contributions with "odd" amounts (i.e., not whole dollars), which is supposedly proof that Obama was being funded by foreign money. Here is a quick look at the data, which shows some interesting patterns, but no evidence of foreign intervention.
The New York Times has an interesting interactive visualization on the influence of presidents on the economy. They ask, Can a President Tame the Business Cycle? The visualization they use is not bad, but would be much more readable if it used a better color scale.
The New York Times uses some of the best information graphics and visualizations on its web site and in the printed paper. But there is also a strange undercurrent of bad graphics, many of which commissioned from other sources, and often published in the New York Times Magazine. It almost feels like between all the good graphs, they need an outlet for the crazy stuff.
With Tax Day (Observed) in the US tomorrow on Tuesday (even the IRS gets confused), I felt like a link to Death and Taxes: A Visual Guide to Where Your Federal Tax Dollars Go would be in order. This beautiful information graphic breaks spending down into all the 'small' things that tax money is spent on, from the FCC to the Army Corps of Engineers. A zoomable interface similar to Google Maps makes it possible to explore this huge graph. As Terry Yoo likes to say, the government's a big place! - and this graph gives you an idea just how much there is.
