I See What You Mean

"The True Odds of Airborne Terror" chart - Gizmodo

John Sviokla , who blogs for the Harvard Business Review about "Innovation, Strategy, [and] Technology," bears witness: In my work with clients, I've seen three primary benefits of superior graphic representation: Great visualizations are efficient — they let people look at vast quantities of data quickly. Visualizations can help an analyst or a group achieve more insight into the nature of a problem and discover new understanding. A great visualization can help create a shared view of a situation and align folks on needed actions. I couldn't agree more. "Swimming in Data? Three Benefits of Visualization" - HBR Blog Network

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.

[Image from " Keventhepang " on Twitter; via Wonkette .]

In a New York Times op-ed back in May, Reason.com editor Nick Gillespie pondered the fiscal consequences of legalizing "victimless" crimes such as prostitution, gambling and drugs: [Here's a way to] help the federal and state governments fill their coffers: Legalize drugs and then tax sales of them. And while we’re at it, welcome all forms of gambling (rather than just the few currently and arbitrarily allowed) and let prostitution go legit too. All of these vices, involving billions of dollars and consenting adults, already take place. They just take place beyond the taxman’s reach... Turning America into a Sin City on a Hill could help President Obama pay for his ambitious plans to overhaul health care and invest in green energy. More taxed vices would certainly lead to significant new revenue streams at every level. Now the folks at nightlife site Sloshspot.com have taken some data from NORML and various U.S. government agencies and created this : Not bad, I think...

I've written before about song lyrics shown in graphic form . And it's Friday afternoon, so what the hey -- I'm going there again. Sometimes this visual gimmick really works. See " Pinball Wizard ," where the lyrics actually provide you with all the necessary data (namely, Tommy's various actions and their frequency). Other times, the song's structure or content just doesn't lend itself to any sort of proper graph. Consequently the message conveyed feels painfully thin, and the joke stupid and weak. One example: "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina," rendered here . I say, if you're going to attempt the visual joke, why not do it right? To do so, we must face up to certain painful facts, namely: Many songs just don't feature quantitative concepts. In such cases, look to flow charts . After all, singing a song is a process. Flow charts proceed forward in time (just like music), often incorporating repetitions (verses or chorus) or variati...

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.

Created by a couple of UK computer science students, this newly upgraded aggregator/search engine delivers results that are both broad and deep. Tags are used extensively and to good effect, but the infoviz applications are where the action is. The Network widget is probably my favorite. To use, hover over a small graphic image to highlight its connections with other items in the network. Hover over bits of text for pop-ups providing additional information. Double-click a node if you want to drill down. If you're looking for news from a certain region, click the Hot Spots map widget and drill down from there. You can further refine the search by filtering the topic of the news stories. Unfortunately, the Trends app is buggy, poorly explained and therefore far less useful. And Silobreaker's collection of pre-set topics (global issues, tech, science, business, energy and world) is certainly incomplete. Even so, the site's dashboard-style interface provides lots of entry p...

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...

Along with Fast Company (and me ), Business Week asserts that good information graphics and info design have business value. An admiring profile of Edward Tufte — with accompanying slide show , natch — is featured in BW's recent "Voices of Innovation" package: Next to a bad example of a graph, he positions a sublimely clear treatment, often using the same data. Simple as it sounds, the effect has proved to be riveting for a generation of nonprofessional designers. Tufte's work is relevant to anyone who needs to write or present information clearly, from business executives to students.   In dismantling some of the worst habits of two-dimensional design, he has framed new analytical terms that flicker through many design conservations [sic]*. * Conventions? Conversations? Or something else? And, more important, have any readers out there recently had a "design conversation" at work? (Media folks, you're DQ'd, sorry.) Do tell.

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!

The ever-astute Lorelei Brown hips us to the "astounding data visualization critiques" at Graphic Sociology . That's one for the blogroll.

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...

The charts over at GraphJam aren't exactly data-heavy or rigorous, but they are often amusing: Graph by weegee64, via the GraphJam builder . Graph by oliver.wolf, via the GraphJam builder . OK, I'm slightly biased here because for years and years I was a paid observer of pop culture (aka journalist) , so naturally I appreciate the GraphJammers' mockery of rock songs and movies. But this stuff pleases me on a professional level too: People who make charts and graphs out of heretofore unchartable (or at least uncharted) cultural artifacts show themselves to be comfortable with graphical renderings. They know how to create them and they know how to read them. And that's nothing but good news for Synoptical Charts and our fellows in the infoviz biz. The more people speak our (visual) language, the more uses they will find for it, and the more they will eventually find themselves relying on it... I hope.

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 ]

John Cole gets his infoviz on and illustrates the actual quantitative difference "between socialism and capitalist nirvana." His bar graph demonstrates that, political rhetoric notwithstanding, the proposed increase for top-bracket taxpayers doesn't exactly warrant the dreaded S word.

Over at American Scientist , Robert Kosara of Eager Eyes weighs in on the difference between SciVis and InfoVis (rivers of blood, people, rivers of blood!): Visualization is often valued for producing pretty pictures for publications. But in scientific disciplines that work in nonspatial realms (bioinformatics, chemistry, the social sciences and so on), visualizing data is useful very early in the process of discovery. Turning numbers into pictures enables scientists to use their human prowess with reading visual data to spot patterns, trends and outliers. There is a historic distinction in the field of visualization between scientific visualization (SciVis) and information visualization (InfoVis). In SciVis, spatial information is almost always a given, coming from measured or simulated three-dimensional objects—photographic images of sorts. In InfoVis, researchers choose the most appropriate and informative layout. He then illustrates some ways in which the farmer and the cowman ca...

I was surprised to read this week that putatively educated Americans ( a Louisiana lawyer, a Colorado dentist , an ABC News reporter ) don't understand the concept of marginal tax rates. Because of this lack of comprehension, per ABC, the lawyer and dentist are vowing to keep their taxable income below $250,000 to avoid President Obama's proposed tax increase: "I've put thought into how to get under $250,000," said [the ill-informed dentist]. "It would mean working fewer days which means having fewer employees, seeing fewer patients and taking time off." Apparently some clarification is called for . Below is a US federal income tax table for 2009 ( source ). This does not mean that if you bring in more than $372,951, every single dollar in your entire pile of money is taxed at 35%. Only Dollar #372,952 (plus whatever additional money you may earn) is taxed at that rate. Dollar #372,950 is taxed at 33%. Meanwhile, Dollar #1 is taxed at 10%. Hence the ter...

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...

A headline from the Guardian About a year ago, University of Huddersfield design student Dave Bowker created Designing the News, a six-part series of data graphics depicting one week's worth of information from and about the Guardian . (It earned him a First .) The methods used in each piece focus on a specific goal of presentation, including the ranking of information, categorisation, colour coordination, illustration, graphing of complex data, and relationship tracking. The purpose of the project is to present the news in a way that people wouldn't usually experience it. This is done by attracting the viewers with beautiful graphics, and then holding their attention with a deeper investigation into the information they see everyday. The rundown of images and approaches can be seen here . Of the various formats and approaches, I think Thursday and Saturday are the most successful. Friday , unfortunately, turns into a blur at 20 paces, while I find Wednesday somewhat hard ...

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.

The proprietor of Complex Diagrams , Noah Iliinsky, delivers an astute critique of two Seattle-area bicycle maps. The discussion illustrates (no pun intended) how even something as simple as a map legend can be rendered confusing or unhelpful through careless design.

Check out dataviz.tumblr.com , a two-month-old collection of charts, information graphics and other artifacts to ponder. Naturally, some are richer and more compelling than others. Three particularly clear, thoughtful examples: Instrument Range What I like : Color coding, always a plus if used intelligently; excellent labeling (sonic frequencies, where octaves start) — which is almost unnecessary given the clever use of the keyboard as the Y axis; X-axis groupings demonstrate not only how categories of instruments compare, but also how each instrument compares with other members of its category. Wishlist: There's not much that needs improvement here. Use a serif font, maybe? Comparing Dangers of Popular Drugs What I like: Shades of solid gray, perfect for photocopying; legible and consistent presentation; table of numbers alongside chart — potentially a distraction — underscores message and clarifies why drugs are charted in this order (by user dependence, in descending order...