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 .

At his blog, Michael Babwahsingh says a number of smart things about the current status and ultimate value of information design. Number 8 is an excellent sample of his sensible macro approach: 8. Commercialization For several years now, the infoviz/dataviz trend has become infused in popular culture; the influence of the information design aesthetic is everywhere, from movie sequences to music videos to art exhibits . Although the intent is often tongue-in-cheek , and may even indirectly promote information design, there is still a risk of diluting, muddling, or flat-out mocking a field that has yet to really define and take ownership of itself. News features and special issues on information design are becoming more common, particularly in the graphic design world, but the tendency is towards visual appeal and surface-level scans over deep investigation (examples include Grafik magazine’s April 2010 issue, Eye Magazine’s Winter 2010 issue , and Fast Company’s Co.Design blog posts...

"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

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...

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 .

Here's another look at public health stats from various countries around the world. As with the first installment of this series , the countries included here rank in the Top 5 in at least one of four categories: Life Expectancy (longest), Under-5 Mortality (least), Health Care Expenditure per Capita (highest), and Prevalence of Physicians (greatest). (Source: Nationmaster.com .) NOTE: Unlike the previous chart, this one omits Macau and Hong Kong, which had made the cut because of their populations' longevity. I omitted these two Chinese territories because the only available figures on the geographical distribution of physicians reflect China as a whole. Result: not only does this camouflage the serious disparity between urban centers and rural districts, it obscures any geographical specifics. Comments and questions are invited.

In selecting my international sample, I decided to examine the top 5 countries in each of four categories:  Longest life expectancy (longest) Lowest infant mortality (least) Highest health care expenditure per capita Greatest prevalence of physicians My source for these stats was the invaluable Nationmaster.com . (Note:  As a proxy for Hong Kong and Macau, I've used China's expenditure figure, since they've both been under Chinese rule for the last decade.) Given where the two dimensions of this graph ultimately lead, I've nicknamed it "Death and Taxes (Sorta)."

Jess Bachman of Wallstats.com , creator of the well-known Death and Taxes poster, has turned his eye to the U.S. government's unemployment statistics. Back in January he published a flowchart clarifying how the government determines who is officially Unemployed and who is merely overlooked. ( Here's how that determination is described verbally by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) What's more, the official numbers have gone up since January. As of the end of June, the official figure is 9.5 percent. Has the Obama administration come up with a new tally to include all the undercounted (I hope)? Or are things just going to hell in a handbasket (I fear)? Click here to see the whole thing. Nice work, Jess.

As thousands and perhaps millions take to the streets in Tehran to protest Iran's (alleged) election fraud, the UK's Guardian goes nitty-gritty, posting a data set of polling results. * The paper ends its report thus: "Can you do something with this data? Please post us your visualisations and mash-ups below or mail us at datastore@guardian.co.uk ." Its story also links to data maps from Fivethirtyeight.com and Iran Tracker. (Elsewhere at Fivethirtyeight, Nate Silver considers the statistical analysis that ostensibly proves the election was rigged -- in other words, the basis of the protestors' unrest.) Here's the direct link to the election data, in case anyone out there feels like having a go at it; I hope I'll have some time to muck around with it myself. DATA: Full Iranian election results by province including turnouts and 2005 results. Download them as a spreadsheet. *Per the story: "The figures we've uploaded are, as far as we can work...

Portuguese infoviz enthusiast Jorge Camoes has spent the last year and a half writing informed, insightful blog posts on the field, complete with examples and citations. To his credit, he approaches everything -- even the revered work of Edward Tufte and Stephen Few -- with loving skepticism. I'm gratified, too, that he seems to agree with me on one central point: Snazzy tools alone don't get you good data visualization. It all comes down to putting serious thought into the project before you plot the first data point. In future posts we'll discuss more of Jorge's ideas. Bem feito, o Sr. Camoes!

Michael Cannell asks on the Fast Company blog (formerly mentioned here ): "Is Information Visualization the Next Frontier for Design?" I'm figuring that's a rhetorical question, since the subhed reads: "As design work shifts to infrastructure and problem solving, sexy infographics are part of the new skill set." Of course we at Synoptical Charts couldn't agree more. He goes on to discuss infoviz as a discipline and mentions its many applications and its immense potential: If we're going to live in a world driven by data, the thinking goes, we need a simple means of digesting it all. We are increasingly a visual society, and our understanding of the world is increasingly made possible by this new visual language.... Designers have historically excelled at finding insightful ways of looking at complex problems. Visualization will likely play a prominent role as design evolves beyond the consumer economy (selling $2,000 poufs and other high-end furnis...

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 ...

San Diego digital artist Tim Schwartz tracked the prevalence of certain words in 158 years of the New York Times and then, rather than create animation or static graphs (too mainstream?), he used that data to power his amusingly retro Command Center (above). Check out those analog gauges and the LED time display! Even the biomorphic shape harks back to a low-tech era. Lovely work, Tim. Playful projects like this give me tremendous hope that soon data visualization will be understood, accepted and even adopted by average folks.

Appointed earlier this week by President Obama, 34-year-old Vivek Kundra is the U.S.'s new Chief Information Officer. Since 2007, Kundra’s group in the DC municipal government [where he had been CTO] has been using a data-visualization package from Tableau Software... Kundra’s group [created] charts and graphs for its CapStat program, which has received a fair bit of attention as a way to present trends and analysis to the general public on municipal issues like crime, disaster response, school security, and city maintenance. The program is one of the ways in which Kundra has been recognized in his efforts to make the workings of the DC government more transparent... Obama’s hope is that Kundra will also help bring more transparency to the federal government. One way this could potentially happen is through websites like Recovery.gov , which was set up to explain the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The intent of the site is to show how, when, and where money from the fed...

Urging users to be "Data Rockstars" (oy), software company Tableau is sponsoring a visualization contest . Entrants are to select and depict one of two data sets: proposals for US stimulus projects or data from 2007 mortgage applications around the nation . I look forward to seeing the results.

Fast Company 's Cliff Kuang tells his readers that information graphics are all the rage among young graphic designers these days, and for good reason: The discipline—involving cartographers, statisticians, computer programmers, and graphic designers—creates public debate on a level graphic design rarely does. As Manuel Lima, the founder of the information graphics website Visual Complexity , once told me, "One of the big challenges we face now is dealing with all the data around us, and finding ways to make it useful." "Visualizing the Economic Stimulus" — Fast Company