The Medium is not the message
I love a good infographic (For those who don’t know, ‘infographic’ is essentially a wanky term for ‘chart’).
Each year infographic tools get better and publishing gets easier. We use Tableau extensively but a large number of tools exist (A couple of years ago, I predicted MS would have bought Tableau by now, but they haven’t yet – don’t know why not).
A good infographic can convey an incredible amount of information in an unbelievably short amount of space and time. As an example, take a look at this incredible visualisation from the New York Times showing box office receipts over the past 22 years. It’s a great visualisation because every dimension communicates an additional piece of information.
Colour shows total box office receipts, height of each movie indicates receipts at any point in time, height of the entire stream shows receipts from all movies at that point in time. Brilliantly conceived.
Let’s look at a counter-example. Consider this effort from the Financial Times to emulate the brilliance of the New York Times infographic team. The infographic below has only a single dimension – size of loss – yet displays this across four dimensions of bubble size, x-axis, y-axis and colour. Why they didn’t use a bar chart is beyond me.
FT Infographic
Now that tools are available to bring infographic creation to the masses, we’ll be seeing the full spectrum of visual display from the brilliant to the ridiculous.
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Thanks for the tip on Tableau.
Information Aesthetics has consistant good thought on presenting information.
http://infosthetics.com/
The NY Times does a wonderful job of presenting information and frequently demonstrates the benefits of a presentation using Flash over a printed chart.
Doug, I know you are in Australia and it would be difficult to attend but, for your other readers Edward Tufte conducts a valued one-day course titled “Presenting Data and Information”.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses
His books are a pleasure to peruse and the course is highly recommended (if you have an interest or job requirement to present information).
There is interesting work being done in presentation of massive data sets – much bigger than the NY times data set – to help mine data for security, experiments etc. Some of those pictorials are pretty bizarre looking though, so I guess the next wave will try to figure out how to make them eye pleasing like the NY Times figure…
I’m sure that, even in an economic downturn, there’ll be work for people skilled at turning massive amounts of data into an informative visual representation.