data design: where math and art collide
TRANSCRIPT
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DATA + DESIGNwhere math and art collide
Trina Chiasson, Infoactive | @trinachi | infoactive.co/data-design
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This year, I did something new.
I worked with 80+ volunteer contributors to write a
300-page ebook.
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How do you write an
open source ebook?
It started with a message…
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Hi Trina! Stats dork from Chicago here… Do you have any plans to include tutorials for basic data cleaning and data selection techniques for users who may not have
any statistics background?
— Dyanna Gregory
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This is what most statistics textbooks look like. Most designers say…
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This isn’t for me
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HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A BAD INFOGRAPHIC?
24.5%NO
84.5% YES
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Why do so many infographics suck?
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THEORY #1
Graphic Designers are evil.
They sacrifice truthful data representation
for aesthetic gain.
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THEORY #2
Marketers are evil.
They sacrifice truthful data representation
for more clicks.
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THEORY #3
Most people aren’t evil.
Good data visualization is really hard to do.
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Who has skills in programming, design, and data analysis?
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Not everyone is blessed with the innate ability to make brilliant data visualizations.
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What data collection looked like, not too long ago
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What data storage looked like, not too long ago
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What data collection looks like today
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1985: The birth of Excel
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But what do we do with all of this data?
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The price of light is less than the cost of darkness.
— Arthur C. Nielsen, Market Researcher & Founder of ACNielsen
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Let’s send our data to a designer who can make it look pretty.
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But most designers are not trained in stats
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How about a friendly introduction to data?
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But how do you write an open source ebook?
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There’s no open source book
on how to write an open source book.
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Don’t underestimate the awesomeness of strangers
on the internet.*
* Especially strangers who volunteer to write books about data in their free time.
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In six months, we wrote and released the
English version.
Data + Design is now being translated in Chinese, Russian,
Spanish, and French.
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Is it true that dataviz people
hate pie charts?
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That’s a complex question.
Arguments against pie charts:
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13% 100%
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13%
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A table is nearly always better than a dumb pie chart; the only worse design than a pie chart is several of them, for then the viewer is asked to compare quantities located in spatial disarray both within and between charts […] Given their low density and failure to order numbers along a visual dimension, pie charts should never be used.
Edward Tufte, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”
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Graphical perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Models
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Meat Pies & Color Theory
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What Color Is This Chart?
#TheChart
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Hot Pie Cold Pie
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Hot PieCold Pie
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Men who cannot read this chart
Men who can read this chart
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So you should use monochromatic
color scales, right?
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Monochromatic scales are better for continuous data
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Be careful with multicolor scales
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Red tends to stand out against other colors
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Can you find the red circle?
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How about now?
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Which is easier?
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Finding boundaries in color vs. shapes
Adapted from: Healey, Christopher G., Kellogg S. Booth, and James T. Ennis. “High-Speed Visual Estimation Using Preattentive Processing.” ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 3.2 (1996): 4.
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So what colors should I use?
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It depends, but…
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BLUE & ORANGE
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More visual trickery
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Our brains look for baselines to compare
distances
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But the dark blue line is measured on a
vertical scale.
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Tricky, indeed.
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Another example…
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At first glance, you might think that the dark blue line decreased in value.
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More visual trickery!
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Same data, different story.
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How do we make data
more human?
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US unemployment rate from 2007-2009
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http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/economy/unemployment-lines.html?_r=0
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In 2008, the Sichuan Earthquake killed over 60,000 people in China.
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“For seven years she lived happily on this earth”
- Mother of an earthquake victim
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How will you
share your data?
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DATA + DESIGNwhere math and art collide
Trina Chiasson, Infoactive | @trinachi | infoactive.co/data-design