Making a good data visualization seems a bit like making a designer cake: the ingredients are just as important as the presentation. In fact, it seems like the recent awards given out encourage presentation at the expense of the ingredients, or edibility. Regardless, a certain amount of balance between visualization and story-telling is necessary to pull it off right.
So the government is publishing a lot of raw data, as they have been doing for some time. The difference is that this information is now more palatable than ever. I’m talking about data visualization, of course. And I think this is a very very good thing. My overall philosophy for getting humanity to work in the long run is truthful education of the masses, and data visualizations are a means to that end. It’s always been easy to get information about a subject from a person, who is likely biased in some way. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to articulate a complex set of data into a few sentences and earn a newsworthy soundbite without inserting bias. Data visualization can remove bias and offer data in it’s natural, unbiased form. For instance, the biased defect projections are best understood in an infographic where they are compared to reality.
However, simply presenting data is not enough. It’s a step up from raw data, but to reach a wide audience there needs to be a narrative of some kind. (This became painfully apparent during our full-on critique last Friday). Even a timeline may not be enough. There needs to be a means to an end here. For example, our groups NC Crime Rate infographic shows crime rates over 15 years. But without looking at per capita crime, the data falls short of really driving the point home. It’s this kind of context that personifies the trends, and makes or breaks the infographic.
News stories have context. When data is added, they take on a whole new dimension. But when live data is presented, they become alive. The section of this documentary about live-updated data conveys this. Data can draw users in, offering more than either a story or a data visualization can on their own. If the data is presented as a narrative, the context of a news story only adds to the impact. I think we’ll see this area of storytelling grow in the future, especially since the tools are available to journalists to easily update data sets without digging around in the code. Platforms like Google Charts, Swivel and Wordle are leading the way.
What does this mean for us iMedia kids right now? It means we have to step up our game on the infographic that’s due next week. Our work needs to be (in this order of importance) aesthetically pleasing, relevant to people and data rich. It’s funny how the actual data comes last, but if something isn’t nice to look at and contextual, it will probably be ignored.