I See What You Mean

Infographics are clearly having a cultural moment. They have become pervasive in newspapers, magazines, blog posts, and viral tweets; they appear on television and in advertising, in political campaigns and at art openings. As a Google search term, “infographic” has increased nearly twenty-fold in the last five years. Yet infographics have been popular, in one form or another, for centuries. The source of their power isn’t computers or the Internet, but the brain’s natural visual intelligence.  Gareth Cook , the editor of Best American Infographics 2013 , has put together a short but true summary of the history of information graphics. (Many of you who see this blog may know most of it already.) His striking lede recounts how much Abraham Lincoln valued his "slave map" (featured in an earlier blog post ). Lincoln's reliance on the shades of gray throughout the Confederacy made an enormous difference in his Civil War decision-making.  Fortunately it's rare that mos

"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.

Booth’s Maps are important documents of mass poverty, but by drilling down and giving huge amounts of detail, they do more than analyze it statistically,” said Beverly Cook, curator of social and working history at the Museum of London. “Many writers and artists of the time saw London as a divided city, split between rich and poor, but these maps show its complexities. In many respects, they give a more realistic portrayal of working class life in London than Charles Dickens’s novels. By making something so complicated seem straightforward, Booth’s Poverty Map was also a triumph of information design. It fulfilled one of design’s most useful functions — helping us to make sense of the world — by distilling an avalanche of information into a clear, coherent form. An Early Triumph in Information Design - NYT.com

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

Check out Lauren Manning's installation/survey about data visualization methods. She has created and mounted 40-odd versions of a big yet easy-to-understand data set. Viewers can show her which versions attracted them most strongly, got them thinking, and so forth by marking up "experience cards" that show the array in miniature. My own faves tend to be those that illustrate the proportions of different foods in fresh ways (mostly in the Abstract/Complex quadrant of her matrix ), rather than just showing images and labeling them with numbers (the Simple/Literal quadrant). Among those I like best: Food by Line Weight Concentric Circles Shaded Box Chart Stacked Bar Chart and Mini Months At the same time, I found a few of the formats hard to grasp; one such is the Rainbow Diagram Full Circle . I don't understand the purpose of the connections or the meaning of the line width. It needs a legend, at the very least. Still, the photoset/installation

To accompany its Better Life Initiative , OECD (the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) has put up a handsome, carefully constructed set of interactive data graphics called the Better Life Index : There is more to life than the cold numbers of GDP and economic statistics – this Index allows you to compare well-being across countries, based on 11 topics the OECD has identified as essential, in the areas of material living conditions and quality of life. Each country is represented by a multicolored flower with 11 petals (OK, yes, potentially cheesy). The length of each petal represents the country's score in a given area; the width of the petal indicates the importance the user has assigned to that particular aspect. Drilling down into the details is easy to do; in fact, if you've a mind to do your own visualizations of this info, the underlying index data can be downloaded in spreadsheet format. Kudos to Moritz Stefaner , Jonas Leist and Timm Kekeritz (

Belated kudos to this fascinating infoviz item from mid-May. Mr. Booth had set out to discover how many people were living in poverty, to determine why and what could be done to help them. As well as proving that there was much more poverty in London than the official statistics suggested, his research revealed the nuances of an increasingly complex city with different degrees of hardship, where the rich often lived alongside the poor. Still seen as landmarks of sociological research, his maps are to be exhibited in the new Galleries of Modern London opening Friday at the Museum of London. “Booth’s Maps are important documents of mass poverty, but by drilling down and giving huge amounts of detail, they do more than analyze it statistically,” said Beverly Cook, curator of social and working history at the Museum of London. “Many writers and artists of the time saw London as a divided city, split between rich and poor, but these maps show its complexities. In many respects, they give a

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

See it now. Based on the recent Wikileaks release of military documents , Mike Dewar and Drew Conway created this animated month-by-month infographic showing the number and location of engagements over five years in Afghanistan. Beautiful work and very sobering. Animated Heatmap of WikiLeaks Report Intensity in Afghanistan - Zero Intelligence Agents

Regular readers of this space may recall that I'm partial to tax-related infoviz . So imagine my excitement in coming across this beaut from the Washington Post : How the fight over tax breaks affects your bottom line Here in the US, the Bush tax cuts are set to expire soon, and the government has several possible courses of action. This graphic interactively depicts three scenarios, and the impact that each would have on the federal budget as well as the taxpayers'. Why it's great: Clean, spare, streamlined. The options are clearly delineated (via tabs) and the change in outcomes is evident and easy to understand. Needless details about taxpayer cohorts (homeownership, filing status, that sort of thing) are wisely avoided; the captions on the vertical axis provide the necessary macro context. The attractive tan-to-red color scheme/progression is subtle yet distinct; though the colors hang together to keep the graphic unified, each of the seven subsets is quite distinct.

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

Presenting headline news (via Google ) in the age of information visualization. This is Newsmap , created by Marcos Weskamp , a Bay Area design engineer who does infoviz and interaction design. Here's how this treemap works: As you mouse over each box, a callout pops up containing that story's first few sentences. Across the top are the different countries you can focus on, or you can select all for a worldwide sample. In the lower right corner are tabs corresponding to different newspaper sections (the colors of which are reflected in the map); again, you can customize the newsmap to suit your interests. Bravo, Marcos.

Booth , of Portland, OR, has rendered the US Interstate Highway System in the style of the London Underground Map . The map itself is awesome: .... but don't miss the Flickr page 's comments section, where enthusiasts point out tiny fixes, suggest edits, and show off their own independent versions of the concept .

"Aughts were a lost decade for US economy, workers" - Washington Post

"The True Odds of Airborne Terror" chart - Gizmodo

The "socially liberal, fiscally conservative, and academically rigorous" (per CQ) Center on Budget and Policy Priorities presents this (literally) graphic depiction of the U.S. government deficit over the next decade. The deficit for fiscal 2009 was $1.4 trillion and, at an estimated 10 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), was the largest deficit relative to the size of the economy since the end of World War II. Under current policies, deficits will likely exceed $1 trillion in 2010 and 2011 and remain near that figure thereafter.... The recession battered the budget, driving down tax revenues and swelling outlays for unemployment insurance, food stamps, and other safety-net programs. Using CBO’s August 2008 projections as a benchmark, we calculate that the changed economic outlook accounts for over $400 billion of the deficit in 2009 and slightly smaller amounts in subsequent years. Those effects persist; even in 2018, the deterioration in the economy since summer 200

I highly recommend this animated infographic , in which Latoya Egwuekwe gives us a quick and crystal-clear history of US unemployment levels from January 2007 to October 2009. This is a great example of how infoviz can tell a story efficiently and in a way any viewer can understand. Thanks, Latoya.

Based on a common and surprisingly versatile visual metaphor, this subway map of the cinematic universe was recommended by some film critic friends.

Brought to our attention by Synoptical simpatica MCL , this gorgeously rendered space map is even deeper than it looks at first glance. The number of rings around each planet depicts how many spacecraft have orbited that planet (most visited: moon), while each imperfect circle represents a capsule's precise path around the planet. National Geographic has a Flash version here . (I kinda hate Flash. Who's with me?) If you want to see or have a static version, you can do both of those here .