TUMBLR

A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...

Jan 02, 2012

Thinking critically about “infographics,” “data visualizations,” and other visual junk

A tale of two graphics:

Exhibit A: MetaCritic’s visual chart/scorecard of albums that appeared on Top 10 Lists in 2011. This is a fine, functional chart — it shows you a ranked, hyperlinked list of popular albums this year on Metacritic, showing 3 additional columns of data: # of times album was ranked #1, #of times album was ranked #2, and # of times album was ranked in another slot. In a very small space, this chart tells you a lot.

Exhibit B: David McCandless’s word cloud of the albums presented as “visualized.”¹ Funny what counts for “visualized”: the album titles/artists float in a “cloud” of text without any hierarchy, except for size, and the text is colored based on country of the artist (an addition by McCandless—not sure of the significance) with a key below. It’s possible based on this chart to tell which album was #1 on the list (PJ Harvey) but which one was #2? #3? #10? In a small space, this cloud tells you very little.²

One resolution for all of us: let’s all think critically about what we see online labelled as an “infographic” or a “data visualization.” Is it really adding value to the original data? Is it something that could’ve been better presented as a list or a simple sentence? Is it just pretty or is it meaningful?

Remember: just because they call it an “infographic” doesn’t mean it’s good.

Filed under: infographics

I pick on McCandless because he’s a popular “data visualization” guy with a best-selling book on the subject, The Visual Miscellaneum See also: Stephen Few’s takedown. ↩
A marketer would argue that infographics like this are very effective “link bait.” ↩