A few weeks ago, the Guardian's datablog published an article on the backlash that seems to be gathering against infographics.  Although they describe it as "gathering steam", some of the sentiments they describe aren't new: it's just a pretty picture but it doesn't actually tell you anything; the design choices obscure the actual data; is this going to be the pie chart that looks like Pac Man again?  In fact, here's a critique of infographics which is nearly two years old.

The main point of the Guardian's article is that tools that have developed in recent years allow people with all sorts of expertise and specialisms to create infographics (rather than just those who know about data, or about design).  Sometimes, this means that the folks putting those infographics together don't follow some of the rules that you'll hear about often at Thunderfly; and sometimes an infographic is used in the same way as stock photography - simply a colourful illustration to break up the text, rather than communicating a message on its own terms.

Now, I know that infographics are just one branch of visualising data, and I'm not averse to a bit of colour.  But I found myself in sympathy with the critics when I encountered this infographic, created for the political social media aggregator, Yatterbox.

Here are the issues as I see it.  First of all, though, you'll need to take off those sunglasses.  No, I don't know why the designer has chosen a tartan background, unless he particularly wanted to bring out the way it clashes horribly with the Union Jack header.  So, first issue: the designer wants to pack in all sorts of information, using a number of different techniques, but the background image draws immediate attention to itself at the expense of communicating their insight.

The stacked bar chart of social media usage isn't too bad; the colours used are related to the service in question (turquoise for Twitter, dark blue for Facebook, poor old Flickr gets white) so the design draws upon our pre-existing brand knowledge as a design shortcut.  But adding white space between the bars makes it tricky to draw comparisons, and the rounded corners also change the shape, and therefore the accuracy, of the sections.  I'm not convinced that the orange bar for RSS feeds looks more than twice the size of the blue Facebook bar.

The bar chart on 'When they joined Twitter' has left me questioning the scale.  Is that a percentage of the people they follow? Raw numbers? I can see that early 2009 was a popular time to get a Twitter account, but how easy is it to compare the second half of 2009 with the first half of 2010?

I'm not sure how relevant - or indeed reliable - the infographics are that are generated from Klout data.  Listing the Twitter handles of the 'most influential' or 'most influenced' means that I don't know whether they're real people or just bots that retweet from elsewhere.  And finally, although the last few snippets are interesting, they're not really 'Trends to Watch'.

What do you think? Are infographics just treated like pictures? What are the positives of the example I've picked out? And does it matter whether infographics are accurate?

I have a longstanding penchant for taking data visualisation into the real world, whether taking pictures on my holidays of 3D pie charts in the wild, or being enchanted by handmade visualisations with bar charts in the flower beds.  So I was delighted to see that there's a data visualisation side to the #Occupy protests. Occupy George is a project to use the ubiquitous dollar bill as a way of circulating infographics about the distribution of wealth within the United States.  Templates are provided to enable participants to print the infographics (onto their own money!) and enter them into circulation, though I'd hazard a guess that they might not last long, either being withdrawn as defaced currency, or kept as a souvenir by somebody who ends up with one in their pocket.

The graphics are simple, clear and get their message across perfectly.  Top marks also for accompanying each of the infographics with a link to the original source of the data, whether that's a conclusions from a think tank report, analysis of public data, or even a 'fact check' piece on a Michael Moore speech.  It strikes me as an elegant way to protest about a matter dear to all our hearts - money.

A much belated post from me this week - apologies.  I'm blaming interference on the line.  That aside, I had a chance to reflect this week on the more artistic end of the visualisation of data, as I was able to get up close and personal with an artwork created by Chris Jordan.

Warren has introduced Chris's work previously on this blog. Chris himself says:

Sociologists tell us that the human mind cannot meaningfully grasp numbers higher than a few thousand; yet every day we read of mass phenomena characterized by numbers in the millions, billions, even trillions.

Chris's work therefore aims to enable each of us, as individuals, to reconnect with the numbers beyond the "anaesthetising" language of statistics, to find meaning and to act on what we find within his art.  Although his approach certainly isn't one I'd advocate to everyone, it is interesting that his aim is ultimately the same as everyone who presents data of any kind - to communicate, and to spur action.

The piece of work I was able to see is called "Shark Teeth", and here it is as you round a corner in the Monterey Aquarium, having just encountered the juvenile Great White shark in their tank.

Based on a watercolour painting by Sarah Waller, the painting is made up of a depiction of fossilised shark teeth, equal in number to the number of sharks killed *each day* for their fins.  If I tell you that the picture is 64"x94", and show you what it looks like up close, you can begin to understand Chris's mission to communicate the message as well as the numbers.

Chris has depicted 270,000 teeth in the picture, which is mind-boggling both for the work that it has entailed for him, and for the number of sharks killed - and that surely is what he's after.

Last week I delivered some closing remarks to the (very successful!) ENQUIRE postgraduate conference. Various PhD deadlines, attending conference sessions and err (whisper it) my lizard brain meant that the task of writing the remarks began at 2pm. I was speaking at 4pm, so this definitely falls into the "sub-optimal" class of presentation preparation. I'd picked up a couple of ideas during the conference and was helped out enormously by a friendly tweet, but how to put it all together - intelligibly - in a very short space of time?

A device used by my academic supervisor popped into my head. When asking a class to read a chapter, he always asks them to come back next week with three key points. As well as focusing in on key aspects of the text, it provides a ready-made structure to note taking.

Why three? Well, instinctively it seems a neat number of things to look at. Whether that's because of its mathematical qualities or its prevalence in literature. Jokes often often rest on a ternary rhythm. Essentially, it just feels neater than two or four (five, I would argue, is too many for a presentation).

So I went with three sources for the inspiration mentioned in the friendly tweet:

1. academic peers
2. academic 'heroes' (our plenary speakers)
3. the ENQUIRE journal

This structure makes it much easier for your audience to follow you, as you can simply explain at the beginning what you're going to cover. It also makes it much easier for you, as the speaker, to drop in the vital signposts which help keep your audience engaged. So before talking about academic peers, say something like "the first source of inspiration, our academic peers" then after that section "so that was the first source of inspiration, our academic peers, now for the second: our academic heroes". This seems fairly banal when written on the page, but it makes a huge difference in keeping an audience with you.

After these three points, I attempted to draw it all together, turning the idea of sources of inspiration on its head and suggested something that the audience could be inspired to go and do by all the great stuff they'd seen in the last two days. My suggestion was to go and start a postgraduate journal and/or conference in their own university, as they still seem to be the exception rather than the norm amongst PhD students. Then there was just time to thank the speakers, organisers and finally the attendees, suggesting they finish by giving each other and themselves a big round of applause. Always a safe note to end on...

This is by no means a 'set in stone' template for how to do a presentation - just an example of how we can reach for familiar patterns to structure our talks, especially when prepaation time is tight. While dividing your presentation up into three parts is a handy way of signposting to help your audience, it doesn't follow that they will remember all three of those things once you've finished talking. You might have to set your sights even lower if you want your ideas to stick. But that's for another post...

Despite the holiday mood, there's still plenty of financial news about; the UK, Europe and the USA continue to make headlines, while they grapple with the ongoing economic slump.  I was prompted to think of this by a posting from a friend on Facebook, who was trying to put the numbers of the recent American budgetary wranglings into a comprehensible context:

• U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
• Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
• New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
• National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
• Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000

Remove 8 zeros and pretend it's a household budget.

• Annual family income: $21,700
• Money the family spent: $38,200
• New debt on the credit card: $16,500
• Outstanding balance on credit card: $142,710
• Total budget cuts: $385

Making the broader economic context accessible is really important; all of us are affected by the financial turmoil, so broadcasters, analysts and commentators have to make considerable efforts to get the public interested in the numbers behind the doom-laden headlines. Warren and I often remind people who come on our courses that if you're using a figure, it needs to do something that a simple table can't do (this was also something I mentioned in an earlier post here).  The Economist's 'Daily Chart' blog has taken a number of approaches to show different pieces of the financial picture, and they obviously subscribe to the same rules, as they often use tables, both online and in the printed publication. Here's one from earlier this month.

Even though the table layout is simple, there's a lot of information and it does require a bit of thought to engage with it.  Of particular interest is the fact that countries in this table are ranked on a composite measure - that is, the Economist's team have calculated each country's rank for the first three measures of indebtedness, and then combined those to produce the rankings shown in the table. Once you've grasped that fact (even if your understanding of how they've done it, or even what those measures actually mean, is a bit hazy), it means you can quickly extract some basic facts.  Who's worst off? (Japan). Who's best? (Sweden, of the countries they've decided to show). Are there any numbers in that table which jump out at a casual viewer? (What's going on with Norway's net debt?).  And if you're so minded, you can dig deeper.   

At the other end of the scale, the Economist's team also produce interactive graphics (something that their colleagues on the print edition aren't able to do), allowing the audience to explore the numbers intuitively.  In their post "Owe dear", the table above is supplemented with a clickable world map. The colour of each country demonstrates each country's debt, as a percentage of their GDP.  Colours are used in an immediately understandable way, going from green (not too bad), through orange, to red (oh dear indeed, particularly from a UK point of view).  Rolling over each country shows the percentage in number terms, and clicking through shows a time series of debt across a number of categories. Some of those graphs come with a health warning - they're stacked line charts, so are tricky to read (as Warren commented in his post on stacked bar charts), and they don't all start from the same year (the UK data goes to 1987, while Germany's numbers start in 1991 and France's in 1994, with no explanation as to why), but there's a lot of information, presented in an attractive and engaging way, enabling comparisons to be made, or suggesting connections - look, debt increases in all categories, Government debt doesn't change too much, financial debt increases enormously compared to household debt - in a way that would be less likely with separate charts.

But for a completely different approach to making the big economic picture comprehensible, there's still nothing quite like the short animation created by Nigel Holmes.  Called "The Surplus and the Debt", this isn't the sort of approach that is open to everyone, but it does show another way of adding context to the big numbers being bandied around.  It opens a conversation about the numbers - and at the end of the day, that's what anyone who is presenting data or information really wants, isn't it?

When you’re thinking about presenting or communicating your information, it helps to begin with an understanding of how humans perceive and understand things.  Warren and I cover this in the courses we run, and we do our best to start from robust and well-researched psychological hypotheses.  A good example of this is the Gestalt theory of perception, which proposes that humans are predisposed to notice patterns (the whole) before noticing its constituent parts.

 

Start from the brain! Photo from Patrick Denker, Flickr Creative Commons

 

So one of the most interesting articles I’ve read about designing presentations comes from a senior psychologist, recently of UCLan, Dr Chris Atherton.  Chris’s blog often has interesting reflections on how her research interests overlap with developments in learning design, and her presentation at the beginning of this year to the Learning Technologies conference draws many of her conclusions together.

 

Chris introduces the notion that memory is intrinsically unreliable, and that if we want our presentations or information to be memorable, we need to help our audience with whatever assistance we can offer. Chris suggests that a schema, that is, a story or rule of thumb, helps us to ‘hang’ information on an existing framework.  This is the concept which underpins those articles suggesting you imagine travelling a familiar route (home to work, for example), ‘hanging’ an item you need to remember at a landmark.  Then when you reimagine that route later (in the supermarket, for example), you think, ah yes! I’m passing Mecca Bingo, that means I need to buy onions.

 

Chris also suggests that memory rapidly becomes overloaded in traditional presentations, as presenters ask their audience to take in large quantities of information from both the presenter themselves speaking, and their slides.  So, her tips are to reduce the amount of information you hope to impart to an audience, and to ‘hang’ it on a schema to help your audience retain it.

 

Chris demonstrated the efficiency of this approach in her experiments in learning design with her own students. She reduced the demands placed on her students by her choice of delivery methods (so, no slides covered with multiple bullet points, tiny writing or difficult to interpret graphs), thereby freeing their cognitive processes to focus on the content of the lectures being delivered by her as presenter.  Her results show conclusively that designing visual aids to complement what she was saying (rather than compete with it for her students’ attention) led to them retaining more information from her lectures.  Happy lecturer, happy students.

 

If you get a chance, do download Chris’s slides from Slideshare; they’re posted with a text commentary as, following her own rules, the slides don’t tell the whole story – the presenter does that.  But in any case, it’s worth remembering: help your audience to remember what you’re trying to get across, by limiting the amount of information you’re trying to communicate, and by providing a memorable approach, such as a story or rule of thumb.