Pussyfooting in combat boots

Mike Monteiro’s Ruined By Design is a firebomb of a book. Monteiro argues that designers of all stripes have a responsibility to the world that outweighs their responsibility to their boss. (The actual book has a lot more swearing.) Parts of this book are going to stay with me for a long time. I’m going to embroider “saying no is a design skill” on a pillow.

My heart says, yes! Designers are responsible for what we make! We need to be able to say no!

We also need to be able to say maybe.

Advertisements

Active legends

(part two of two)

In Glass Benches part one, I argued that it’s worth spending ink to help readers interpret unusual graphs. Plenty of designers have come to the same conclusions, and how-to-read sections aren’t uncommon in data visualization. See this heatmap from the Financial Times:

The more intricate the visualization, the more complex the how-to-read becomes, like this cloud of mascaras from Sonja Kuijpers:

Novel charts need explanation. But to be honest, I find how-to-read sections alienating. They take me away from the content of the visualization. Traditional legends doesn’t teach me anything about the topic at hand—they just teach me about the design of the visualization.

I’m a designer. I love design! But information design doesn’t mean information about design. It means designing to inform. I prefer active legends that demonstrate how to interpret the visualization by using part of the actual visualization. I also suspect that active legends are easier to remember than external legends. The reader uses an active legend to interpret real information, rather than passively observing it in a hypothetical situation.

Glass benches: genre and minimalism in data visualization

(Part one of two)

I went to the campus art museum this weekend and found an unexpected puzzle. Which of these objects am I allowed to touch?

I go to museums a lot. In my mental model of a museum, anything with a little rope around it or a dark outline on the floor is an Exhibit and Not To Be Touched. By those rules, the bench is forbidden, but the plinth is fair game.

To the security guard’s amusement/alarm, I guessed wrong: I avoided the bench, and tried to put my sticky fingers on the shiny surface of the plinth. I was misled by genre.

Thoughts on the semester project: why protests?

On January 21, 2017, I put on my second-warmest hat and took to the streets of D.C., along with 200,000 of my closest friends. There was an extraordinary sense of connection, not just to the people around me, but to my family around the country who sent me pictures from their marches, and to the 424 other Women’s Marches happening at the same time.

I felt that sense of connection over and over again while protesting. And this year, I found a data set from Count Love that catalogued protests in America from January 2017 through the present. I’m spending an entire semester analyzing and visualizing that data.

Why protests? As I mentioned, I have some personal experience with the matter. Before going to grad school, I did my fair share of shouting and sign-waving in D.C. And the more protests I attend, the more I realize how little I know. The Women’s March was very different from counter-protesting pro-lifers at a women’s health clinic, which was very different from standing outside the Capitol building late into the night, dreading the vote on repealing Obamacare.

All those protests happened in the same place, about a consistent set of liberal positions. If there is that much variation in my not-very-varied experience, I can’t imagine how different protests are across the full landscape and ideological spectrum of this country.

I want to find out.

People protest because they care. I want to know what drove people to the streets. I want to know about nation-wide movements, and moments in local politics that never spread beyond one town or city.

I have four goals in this piece:

1. Look at trends across the entire country
2. Examine a few examples of local protests
3. Invite readers to explore protests in and around their homes
4. Draw on that sense of connection to build an aesthetic for the piece

Aside from lurking technical problems, I suspect my biggest challenge will be keeping the data art from unduly influencing the data analysis, and keeping the analysis from draining all the expressiveness from the art. But the only way to find out is to move forward with the project so: off I go!

Profiling protest data (or, what I did on my summer vacation)

This summer, I joined UVA’s Data Science for the Public Good program as a graduate fellow. I learned a ton, and I can’t speak highly enough of my experience there. One of the first lessons: ten weeks of data science sounds glamorous, but it’s four weeks of data profiling for every four weeks of data wrangling for every two weeks of data analysis.

There’s nothing new I can say about data wrangling. However, I want to take a moment to sing the praises of data profiling. Data profiling is a systematic way to dig into your data and evaluate fitness-for-use, beyond measures of central tendency and the first/last 5 rows. The data profiling method I learned at UVA has three pillars: completeness, uniqueness, and validity. I added an additional step: auditing for accuracy.

When you profile your data, you’re going to find stuff that looks weird! By investigating the weird stuff, you’ll get a real feel for your dataset’s texture and quirks, and a sense of what you can expect when working in it later.

I’ll show what can be learned from completeness, uniqueness, validity, and accuracy, with examples from the Count Love’s protest data. R code snippets are included where appropriate, and my full profiling script is available on github.

Coping with Minard’s non-Euclidean cartography

Charles-Joseph Minard (1781-1870) was a French civil engineer, visualization designer, and all-purpose nerd. He’s best remembered for the invention of flow maps, which show the quantities of materials, people, or traffic moving from one place to another. He also didn’t think much of North Africa, South America, or the existence of Ireland:

(Ireland added for emphasis.)

As Sandra Rendgen wrote in The Minard System,

“Minard quite deliberately and continually transgressed every idea of cartographic precision… his ‘non-Euclidean cartography’ is not the result of coincidence, incompetence, or mere negligence. On the contrary, we must consider it a clear decision on Minard’s part to treat cartography as an ‘auxiliary canvas’ on which his main story (i.e., the drama of the statistical numbers) unfolds.”

It’s easy to be appalled by Minard’s fast-and-loose approach to world geography. See this map of English coal exports in 1860:

Communicating with chaos

In the wake of last week’s shootings in Dayton and El Paso, I saw the following exchange on Twitter:

Q on the chart: why a bubble chart? There's so much overlap it's hard to read, about only takeaway is that there are more shootings/deaths after 2010, but not the extent.
In my opinion standard stacked bar chart works better (like one from @TheEconomist)?https://t.co/tzH0DJ35j8

— Toon Vanheukelom (@TVanheukelom) August 10, 2019

The Financial Times bubble chart trades clarity for expressiveness; the Economist bar chart trades expressiveness for precision. That bubble chart is particularly interesting in light of recent conversations about the covering mass shootings: