Doing Minard one better? Reinventing Tufte’s favorite information graphic

April 22, 2012By carlainformation, interactives

To many, Edward Tufte is best known for his dogged and unwavering promotion of Charles Joseph Minard’s Napoleon’s March to Moscow graphic as the perfect form of information visualization. That, and those swanky flyers that he sends out through the mail. Until I attended Tufte’s seminar a few years ago, I was ashamed to admit that I had never given that graphic more than a cursory glance. Once I did, however, it took me five or ten minutes to really understand it. And I was kind of turned off by that. So I’ll add my voice to the growing chorus of those that disagree with Tufte. But I’ll be less articulate. I just didn’t understand it, plain and simple. That’s actually one of reasons that I started this blog. Is there such a thing as the perfect visualization of information?

Of course there isn’t. And anyone who insists otherwise merely has a strong opinion.

So, if you accept that, then there’s the issue of, for each piece that we create, where is the sweet spot between accuracy and getting our message across? That’s a messy answer, in my opinion. I always want to be accurate, but if it’s at the expense of losing my audience, or making them work too hard to understand what I’m attempting to convey, it’s on me, the designer/developer, to take a step back and either try a different approach or rethink whether the project is worth doing.

So, imagine my delight when I found the site of Michael Friendly, a professor of statistics and noted author on data visualization at York University, who would like to do Minard one better. He issued a challenge to data visualization developers:

Can we re-draw it in some modern programming language? What does this tell us about comparative power and simplicity of various programming languages and environments?

The visualizations that are featured in Friendly’s site are fascinating attempts to recreate and re-imagine this graphic by today’s developers. Cool stuff. Granted, there’s myriad other examples online of others trying to do the same thing. But Friendly’s site had, to me, a great range of what’s out there. Too bad many of the examples cited are in printed books and hard to access. But digging through the examples is worth it. Imagine, for example, Napoleon’s march through a 3D cube which visualizes time and distance through various layers. Or as a trippy, post-apocalypic romp through physical space? My favorite is this Flash re-creation of the whole shebang, from the perspective of… everything. This is what people mean when they say “bells and whistles.” I chuckle to think what the very intense Edward Tufte’s assessment would be. Props to Menno-Jan Kraak for a terrific website cataloging all of these examples.

And, if you are really, really, really into the Minard graphic, go here for more, ranging from atlases to games.

Oh, and there’s even a piechart. But I’ll let you find that one yourself. Here’s the fancy original image from Wikipedia.

Minard

 

 

If a pie chart makes you squint…

April 20, 2012By carlainformation

Came across an interesting post by Andy Kriebel on pie charts. He essentially deconstructs the decision-making process around how to choose the right format for showing change in a few variables over time. Sound simple? Yes, then no. What starts out as a simple exercise…

Andy Kriebel's pie chart exercise
pie chart showing three data points for one year; same format for another year... see how the data changes

…turns into a practical, instructive seven-step journey through different formats. As designers, we’ve all been through this process of trial-and-error, pros and cons. But it’s very helpful to see the breakdown of what you gain or lose by each format.

If a pie chart makes you squint, look away.

It’s pretty clear (at least to me) that the consensus is this: pie charts are good for one thing, and one thing only: showing the relationship of the parts to the whole. They are not good for showing a gazillion slices of data–they are good for showing two. Or three. They are not good if they make you squint. And they are useless for an apples-to-apples approach.

And donut charts? Forget about it. The white circle in the middle makes it impossible to see where the angles meet, undermining a user’s attempt to size up slices and make comparisons. EagerEyes cites research showing the readers focus on the center, where the angles are formed and the lines meet.

As EagerEyes points out, human beings are terrible at gauging anything other than 90 and 180 degree angles–we can discern halves and quarters but beyond that, not so much. That’s where bar charts and other formats come in. Stephen Few tells us to save pies for dessert.

My takeaway is: be very clear about what you are trying to show, and only use pie charts when:

  • it is important that you show the relationship of one thing to another that a pie chart intuitively portrays–how the parts relate to the whole (e.g., when a piece shrinks the other pieces grow)
  • AND (not if) you have a few points to share, not itty bitty slices that require squinting
  • you remember that pie charts do not do a good job of visually comparing and contrasting specific values to one another over time (an apples-to-apples approach

(Pssst… I’m still going to make donut charts now and then. They’re pretty.)

 

Clustering via tree mapping: fantastic data visualization

April 19, 2012By carlainformation, interactives

How do you empirically score the importance of a gazillion science journals, and show the results in 10 seconds?

Here is a fantastic example of clustering via tree mapping (using Flare), produced by Eigenfactor.org and Moritz Stefaner, a noted data visualization designer. The interactive  shows how different scientific journals are scored according to a value called an Eigenfactor score–the relative importance of a journal in its field. The score essentially counts the number of citations tracking back to a particular journal and–more importantly–the significance of those citations. The tree map is interactive and the interface intuitive–clicking on a particular cluster shows the path of incoming and outgoing citations (and their relative importance). Wow. I’m in love.

The tree mapping interactive is one of four very cool data visualizations (built using Flare)  that Eignenfactor.org has developed–all of which attempt to show information flow in science. Citation patterns, change over time and information mapping are the others. I’ll write about these in later posts, but suffice it to say that you can spend hours on these.

Eigenfactor clustering via treemapping

 

Soccer and treemapping: infographic

April 17, 2012By carlainformation

Remember Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries in 200 Years, the four-minute snippet of the Joy of Stats documentary? If only all data visualizations could convey the energy of this passionate four-minute narration, we wouldn’t be be writing cheeky/snarky commentaries on bad infographics–we’d all be learning R or something, I guess.

Perusing the interwebs in search of entertainment, accuracy and clarity, and lamenting the fact that my toddler has encroached upon my ability to watch uninterrupted fútbol, I came across a nice example of tree mapping–clear and to the point. More importantly, it shows where the Premier League spent its precious pounds on transfer players in 2011. Wondering if we’ll see more transfer scandals like Tevez and West Ham, but that’s a different blog, I suppose.

If you’re interested in tree maps, read the 10 Lessons in Treemap Design by Juice Analytics. Yes, it was written waaaay back in 2009 but still holds true, IMHO.

Premier League soccer transfer spending 2011

Bad infographics. A crime against humanity?

April 14, 2012By carlainformation

Stumbled across Bob LeDrew’s post on bad, bad infographics (the extra “bad” is mine). Point well-taken. Bad infographics, Bob writes, follow the same cycle as most technologies or skills that begin with a small group of people with specialized knowledge, then become corrupted by the great unwashed masses who insert their own opinions and tawdry styles (in the case of infographics and data viz, this would be opinions on colors, typography, composition and–egads–data). Okay, Bob was not being nearly as cheeky as I am–he was making a good point. Good infograpics have gone bad.

I suppose it’s tempting for eager designers to vomit up some large fonts, colors and a few rows of Excel and call it a day.

Heck, I’ve done it. It’s fun. I also remember learning Photoshop back in 1995 or so and using the hell out of the “Clouds” filter for a few weeks. And the day I discovered Myriad and didn’t stop using it for two years (still do).

So, where was I going with all of this? Oh, right. Bad infographics. My point–Bob’s right, sort of. But I also think that it is really, really cool that there are so many people out there that are actually interested in information. Bob links to Doug Haslam’s hysterical Pinterest board “Infographic Crimes Against Humanity.” I laughed until I cried, and then I cried some more. And then I posted some of them as my favorites. On Facebook, even. Really, I did. Sorry Doug. But the beer ones were pretty good. And then there’s PhD in Facial Hair. Made. My. Day. My beloved partner’s assessment of these two infographics, by the way? “I kind of like it, but I don’t know anything.”

Exactly.

Beer saved the worldFacial hair

 

Legos as a data visualization tool?

April 14, 2012By carlainformation, news

Yep, according to GM. An interesting article by Fast Company by talks about how GM, frustrated with data coming in traditional form (reports, bar charts, etc.), wasn’t getting the message across–a 2D solution wasn’t highlighting a 3D problem. So they used Legos to denote very physical things like location (colors denote where a particular part was located in a vehicle) and size (how bad is the problem).

Interesting. I find myself wondering how we, as designers, would tackle visualizing information differently if we could build it and model it in physical, not virtual, space.

I do know that switching media–a sketch on a napkin, laying out post-its on my whiteboard, or positioning pencils on a table–can be a useful way to inject perspective into a design. With a toddler in the house, I realize that I may have more tools at my disposal…

geeking out on a good infographic

April 13, 2012By carlainformation

I stumbled across Junk Charts’ informative deconstruction of a data-driven infographic on income distribution across the U.S.

Bottom line (and I agree)–lead with the data, but unobtrusively–don’t overtax the reader. The first thing you see is an intuitively simple breakdown of income distribution. The use of color is excellent–you don’t even have to read the legend closely to understand that dark means highest concentration of income (rich) and light means least (poor). And you can see at a glance how this plays out across states.

However, I did spend a minute trying to figure out what the top horizontal line meant on the second part of this chart (income distribution by state) and realized, belatedly, that it was the national average. I would have treated that just like a state so that users could compare easily, perhaps setting the color differently (e.g., dark blue to light blue). And, as Junk Charts correctly points out, ordering the states by something other than alpha order (e.g., quintiles) makes sense.

There’s some interesting back and forth about how the top and bottom scales are colored. Same colors used for two different scales–good or bad? Design or accuracy? You don’t always have to choose one or the other–I would have opted for a different, albeit complimentary, color scheme for each of the two.

Here’s the original infographic on income distribution, posted back in December 2011.

Income Distribution across the US

 

The Girl Store: Buy a girl her life back

April 11, 2012By carlainformation

Aside from winning a 2012 interactive award from Communication Arts magazine recently, and if for one second you can manage to forget the deep commitment of this site to protecting the welfare of young girls, you’d nonetheless be forced to admit that The Girl Store is magnificently beautiful. The interface is clean and intuitive. The choices are simple (and poignant) and the design of this product as a true e-commerce site where one can, indeed, “buy” these girls all evoke the power of turning the purchase of human beings on its head. I could go on, but I won’t. Visit the site.

The Girl Store - Buy a girl her life back

 

color coordination: infographic

April 7, 2012By carlainformation

The next time you want to have a conversation with your graphic designer about color, please pull out this handy-dandy infographic first (by Kissmetrics). No, it’s not the best infographic in the world, but these are common-sense things that many of us do that are  sometimes difficult to explain, especially before we’ve had our coffee. So, before you talk to us, read this.