I See What You Mean

This is an amusing yet cautionary illustration that expresses exactly what I hate about so very many infographics. This approach dumbs down the information under the guise of making you smarter. Hat tip: VizWorld .

"A Tour Through the Visualization Zoo" is a fantastic introduction to some attractive and sophisticated new visualization formats. The article and illos were put together by Stanford's Jeffrey Heer, Michael Bostock, and Vadim Ogievetsky. Heer is an HCI/visualization genius whose journal articles I've been following with interest; Bostock is the whiz behind the D3 archive of javascript code for visualization. Run, don't walk. It's great.

Michael Friendly and Daniel J. Denis have a wonderful interactive timeline on milestones in the theory and practice of data visualization. Be prepared to spend a lot of time there; it's a deep well. Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Visualization

SEED magazine's recent rundown of the pluses and minuses of charting is well worth a read, especially if you haven't spent hours and hours considering which graphical formats are most effective and why. To wit: Many psychoperceptual studies have explored the human mind’s aptitude for gleaning information from pictures. Unfortunately, the pie chart incorporates tasks that we humans systematically fail to perform accurately, all those exercises that come at the bottom of the hierarchy of perceptual tasks... So although we’re good at comparing linear distances along a scale — judging which of two lines is longer, a task used in bar graphs — and we’re even better at judging the position of points along a scale, pie charts don’t bring those skills to bear. They do ask us compare angles, but we tend to underestimate acute angles, overestimate obtuse angles, and take horizontally bisected angles as much larger than their vertical counterparts. The problems worsen when we’re asked to ...

Back in 1974, Yale poli-sci professor Edward Tufte published a slim volume called Data Analysis for Politics and Policy (Prentice-Hall, $3.95). The book in its entirety is available for free download (PDFs) at Tufte's website, accompanied by a contemporary review from the Journal of the American Statistical Association . More than 30 years later, the review amuses me with its restrained praise of the perspective that would eventually make Tufte a Major Figure (and a minor fortune ): Tufte puts residual plots to good use to gain understanding of a data set, and he shows how finding outliers gives the analyst hints about the inadequacy of a statistical model... The discussion of graphical techniques in general is quite good... A brief but compelling discussion of the "value of data as evidence ," with regard to the interpretation of nonrandom samples, is presented. If you happen to have a spare 48MB lying about, DAPP 's worth a download. [via Sofa Papa ]

At the PTS blog , Excel charting whiz Jon Peltier takes an all-too-common type of crappy chart and walks the reader through his methods for analyzing and improving it. He starts with this: ... and ends up with this far better version: The second version is far clearer and more scaleable — not to mention that it's more correct mathematically. (He alters the bars to make them all the same width; this does away with any questions about whether the varying widths mean anything, and if so, what that might be.) Overall, Peltier's site is a handy resource, with pages of newbie-friendly tutorials and tips here . Thanks, Jon.

Over at Eager Eyes , Robert Kosara has a suggestion for the Obama Administration. He points out that making the government's raw data available to the public could enhance governmental transparency* and lead to some new ways of looking at the country's problems. The challenge is not only data availability. A lot of data is, in fact, available. The US is the most transparent nation in the world – to an extent that can be frightening to an outsider (think pay data for state employees, property tax data, etc.). The challenge is that a lot of data is published in a format that is human-readable, not machine-readable. This might sound like a good thing, but it's not. Machine-readable data can be processed and transformed into any number of human-readable forms, that direction is trivial. Making human-readable data accessible to a machine is much more difficult, error-prone, and expensive. What we need is a National Data Agency (NDA). This agency would be tasked with collecting ...

Dave Gray's thriving firm, Xplane , introduces businesses to "visual thinking": Visual thinking is a way to organize your thoughts and improve your ability to think and communicate. It's a way to expand your range and capacity by going beyond the linear world of the written word, list and spreadsheet, and entering the non-linear world of complex spacial relationships, networks, maps and diagrams. In other words, it's infoviz (which is usually based on hard data ) plus sketching, mind-mapping, flow charts, symbols and more. Gray has uploaded nine learning modules on the topic at his Visual Thinking School ; though breezy and charming, they're less useful as how-to lessons than as a further reminder of how instantly and powerfully images can convey information. (For examples, see especially the Visual Mapping module .)

When I try to describe the field of information visualization to folks who haven't heard of it, I end up gesturing a lot, or resorting to vague buzzwords, or talking about bar graphs and pie charts and leaving my companion wondering what's so all-fired cool or revolutionary about that stuff. But now I'm starting to think of it as akin to translation. Here's why. You can take this: There are key differences between Great Britain, the United Kingdom, and England—names often used interchangeably. Great Britain Great Britain is an island that consists of three somewhat autonomous regions that include England, Scotland, and Wales. It is located east of Ireland and northwest of France in the Atlantic Ocean. The United Kingdom The United Kingdom is a country that includes England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Its official name is “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.” England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are often mistaken as names of count...

As someone who deeply appreciates raw data and admires those who wrangle it, I have to give a shoutout to my fellow travelers out there: Big bunches of ripe bananas to the primates over at Infochimps , "a community to assemble and interconnect a giant free almanac, with tables on everything you can put in a table—things like a century of hourly weather, every major league baseball game, decades of stock prices, or every US patent filing." Check out the (still small but interesting) visualization gallery . Numbrary , whose name is self-explanatory, is "a free online service dedicated to finding, using and sharing numbers on the web." At present its focus seems to be financial and demographic, with info from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics , Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System , U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis , U.S. Census Bureau , the SEC EDGAR Database and CIA - The World Factbook . Swivel , which aims to "make it easy for eve...

Well, first of all, he's my hero, and has been since I first attended one of his seminars back in 1987. More to the point, I'm far from alone in my appreciation of him , and here's why: I described Edward Tufte as a graphic designer, but that’s not exactly right. His field is almost sui generis, containing bits and pieces of art direction, data-crunching, economics, historical research, and plain old expository writing. It’s often labeled “information architecture,” or “analytic design.” Tufte himself describes it many ways, but one is drawn from a classic piece of science writing: “escaping Flatland,” or using paper’s two dimensions to convey several more. Another, more acidic description: “getting design out of fashion and out of the hands of Microsoft.” His four books have collectively been called a Strunk and White for design. Tufte works by showing both outstanding and horrid graphics he’s found, improving upon the latter, and his principles take on the meditative qual...