I See What You Mean

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

Alex Pareene, at Salon, for one: I can explain the magnitude of the federal debt pretty easily: The recession caused revenue to plummet, and tax rates have been very low for years. Plus wars. But I explained that with words. Who reads words? No one, unless those words have lines next to them, or colored bars. America's Deficit Chart Surplus -- Salon