Maps of public transportation are my favorite visual shorthand for any major city, not only because I have to rely on mass transit where ever I go, but also because these highly stylized versions of cities contain much more than the bare minimum amount of information to get from one point to the next. I will be in Tokyo checking out the public transit system and attending the 4S conference through the end of the month.
See you back here in September.
What I like most about this graphic is that it summarizes great research from Pew that many folks would not have perused by reading Pew’s publicly available reports. That’s always one of the reasons I tout information graphics – they make information accessible and interesting to people who don’t have the drive/access/time to read full reports and the graphics often give more detail than do executive summaries. Clearly, any summary cannot give all the granularity of the report, but I assume most people do not read full reports. This comprehensive visual summary packs in more information than would a journalistic article about the research that have to include the requisite interview with a teen who texts or the parent who pays her bill or the person who was injured by a texting driver (or the guilty driver). Only sprinkled among the vox populi would we see a couple of quotes from a couple of ‘experts’ who conducted the survey. And nobody can summarize all that much in a total of four-ish quotes. I am still weighing the pros and cons of recommending that standard executive summaries be replaced by (accompanied by?) information graphics like this, at least in the case of survey-based reports.
Out with the written executive summary, in with the infographic summary? Please debate.
I couldn’t find the actual references so I added some of my own where you can corroborate things like the Finnish PM who broke up with a girlfriend over text and the story of the first text message sent by Neil Papworth. My guess is that the bulk of the information comes from Pew while a lot of the fun facts come from the other sources. But I couldn’t find that out for sure without a great deal of effort (like tracing back every single datapoint in each of the components of this graphic).
The interwebs has a social policy of hyperlinking to sources. Please folks, keep that going someway, somehow. Otherwise we risk plagiarism which is bad in itself (see my dissertation 2011). Additionally, when it is not possible to check facts, exaggerations, methodological mistakes, made up info, and just plain lies are harder to ferret out.
Pew Internet and American Life Project
Report on Mobile Access (7 July 2010)
Report on Teens and Mobile Phones (20 April 2010)
shanesnow. (18 August 2010) “US and Worldwide Texting Trends” Original post at mashable.
Boyes, Roger. (14 March 2007) How potato love affair with Finnish PM went off the boil. The Sunday Times online.
BBC News Online. (3 December 2002) Hppy Bthdy Txt.
New York mapped by geotagged photos
This map of New York was created by Eric Fisher. He gathered the geotags of the photos uploaded to flickr. The colors work like this: blue photos were taken by locals (deemed to be local because they had taken pictures in the same location over an extended period of time), red indicates photos taken by tourists (people taking photos outside of their frequent-photo-taking-zone), and the yellow ones were indeterminate (taken by people who hadn’t uploaded any photos in the previous 30 days though we guess they might be tourists because they may be the kind of people who only take photos while on vacation).
I like the aesthetic and the method so that’s why I decided to share.
Time and Newsweek Circulation from the year 2007
Time and Newsweek Reader Demographics Table (US Pop. data from 2008 American Community Survey)
Time and Newsweek Reader Demographics - Graph
These graphics accompany the graphic in my previous post about the counts of humanitarian images in Time and Newsweek. They are meant to give context to the methods section which describes these two magazines in terms of a few demographic variables and circulation information. I do not have access to the original source so I could not go back and get more demographic information besides household income and readers’ ages. It is possible that those were the only two pieces of information available in that source about reader demographics.
The big question is: do you like the graph of the demographic data or should I just leave it in a table? I won’t tell you which way I’m leaning so as not to prejudice your opinions.
Go ahead, feel free to leave a one word comment (the one word being graph, table, or neither). If you’re feeling especially motivated, it would be nice if you explained your reasoning. But it’s August, so I’ll cut you some slack if all you can muster is a single word.
American Community Survey – 2008.
Mediamark Research & Intelligence (MRI). 2008 (Fall). Magazine Audience Estimates. New York: MRI.
1. Menlo is my favorite font of the moment for information graphics.
2. I have no idea why I haven’t seen this Venn diagram before. In my humble opinion, if you are a social scientist and you are attempting to display a concept that may or may not have solid numbers to back it up, start with the Venn diagram because:
a. Venn diagrams are easy to make.
b. Venn diagrams are easy to understand.
c. Venn diagrams are not expected to represent solid numbers. They certainly can be employed in that way, but they are not always employed in that way so you are not likely to mislead readers that you are backing your claim up with census data.
3. I am doing a bit of research on marriage and I have run up against many arguments that seem to believe that marriage and childbearing always go together, or at least that they OUGHT to always go together. News flash: 36.9% of children are born out of wedlock (Cherlin, 2008). Other adults get married but do not have children. Yet other adults get married, have children, and then end up unmarried again because divorce and death ended their marriage. The above graphic should help clear up what actually happens in the world. Marriage and child raising frequently have no overlap.
I was so upset that I didn’t stop and look up the actual data for each of these segments. In part, I wanted to leave it as a universal concept and NOT tie it to US data. But yeah, I realize it would be better if I had sat down and figured out how many people are in each of these three areas. That’s coming in the article version. And after I take a deep breath to disperse the anger I feel at people who make illogical arguments.
Cherlin, Andrew. (2008) “The Marriage Go-Round.” New York: Vintage.
Humanitarian Images by World Region in Time and Newsweek (2007-2008) | by me with Jen Telesca and Nandi Dill
I realized after I posted this that I had forgotten to include Australia and New Zealand. Big oops. I forgot them because they were not represented in any of photos in the humanitarian articles in Time or Newsweek during 2007-2008. This does not mean there were no humanitarian crises in Australia or New Zealand during those years, just that Time and Newsweek could not or did not cover those stories with photography (if at all).
I had also not had time to include one more layer of information which is the percentage of images that were ‘crisis’ images. The best way I can think to explain this goes like this: In any humanitarian crisis there are victims so victims appear in just about all the images but some images also include people trying to help. So, for instance, if Latin American countries ever made it into the news weeklies (and those countries are under-covered as it is) 86% of the time they were depicted as facing an impending or ongoing crisis. They weren’t depicted as helping themselves or anyone else. In the US, only 16% of the figures in the images were depicted as victims of impending or ongoing crises. The US, and developed countries in general, were more often depicted as helping out than as being victims.
Infographic Humanitarian images in Time and Newsweek
Jen Telesca and Nandi Dill, my fellow research assistants at the Institute for Public Knowledge, presented a paper last year based on data they gathered doing visual content analysis of Time and Newsweek during the years 2007 and 2008. They looked through each issue, identified the articles that were humanitarian in nature, and then coded those images according to geography, the type of situation depicted, and the purported status of the individuals in the image (military actor, activist, politician, celebrity, etc). I am helping create the graphics and I thought I would share this one even though it isn’t yet complete.
As per usual, I welcome your comments and criticisms with open arms. Tear it apart, but be specific.
There were a total of 130 articles containing 363 images. The above graphic is supposed to help viewers come to the realization that not all areas are equally represented. I assumed – and this is a wild leap here – that there is some baseline level of social disease and natural disaster plaguing any population. More people = more trouble though we know the relationship is imperfect. Poor areas may experience a natural disaster as a humanitarian crisis leading to orphanhood, starvation, lack of adequate food and shelter where another region would have experienced the same natural disaster as a major inconvenience but one that insurance policies would more or less cover. A natural disaster does not always become a humanitarian disaster. Variables like wealth, racism, literacy, and so forth do play a role and I cannot capture those elements by showing a simple population statistic.
Am I forgetting something major? Am I taking Time and Newsweek to be tellers of the truth, representers of the world as it is, completely objective and unbiased by budgetary constraints or political agendas? Not really. I’m also not trying to push those issues too hard. One could assume from this graphic that some regions are more likely to be represented as suffering from (or aiding in the recovery from) humanitarian emergencies than others for reasons that have nothing to do with the frequency of these kinds of emergencies.
I hope that the graphic leads you to wonder why some regions appear more frequently than others but that it does not beat you over the head with the claim that Time and Newsweek like to depict Africa and the Middle East as sufferers and the US as altruistic helpers far more than a random sample of suffering or aid giving would indicate. Just look at Europe. They appear neither to suffer from or aid in humanitarian crises much compared to how many people live there. One theory is that US based magazines prefer to show US citizens performing acts of altruistic heroism rather than showing Europeans lending a hand. To what degree is Africa over represented because there are simply more humanitarian emergencies there versus being over represented in images because in this particular moment, in these two magazines, Africa equates well with the typical imagination of victimhood?
The graphic cannot answer all those questions. Mostly it just intends to raise them. What do you think?
I will post the next draft when it is ready. I’ll tell you right now that it will include an indication of how often impending or ongoing crises were associated with each region. That should make it easier to tell which geographies are shown to be full of victims and which are full of altruists.
[There is a future graphic that uses the same dataset to show that being a victim and being an altruist are more or less mutually exclusive. For instance, stories involving crises in Africa almost never show Africans helping Africans. Instead, folks from wealthy countries are usually the ones depicted doing the helping.]
Katie Roiphe wrote an excellent article – “The Naked and the Conflicted” – in the New York Times that tracks the treatment of sex by male novelists from writers like Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and John Updike through to contemporary writers like Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, and Benjamin Kunkel. The upshot is that newer male novelists do not include the exuberant, even extreme, sex that got previous male novelists in trouble, but at least made them interesting. The younger writers’ sex scenes involve a lot more cuddling if they have any sex scenes at all. It’s a good article, I recommend that you read it.
I really like that an article about novels and plots – not something that easily lends itself to information graphics – includes not one, but two different visualizations. I also happen to like that they are magenta. It’s a story about sex – magenta is a good way to scream for attention.
I don’t know about you, but these are probably only good as jokes. And joking with information graphics is just fine by me. I encourage it.
If one were to try to interpret these as graphics, though, I have a few recommendations. First, I would have ordered the authors in the same way on both visualizations. Right now they are mirror images and it makes it harder to follow the patterns. I think the graphic could have been funnier and more helpful if there had been an axis labeled with what constitutes sex, more sex, outrageous behavior. If you read the article, some of this becomes clear, but the graphic doesn’t stand on its own without the article. And the snake-y graphic just doesn’t do much at all. There is no reason for all the snakiness – just makes it hard to read which obscures the point. It might have even been funnier if each of the adjectives had been in its own bubble where the size of the bubble increased the more authors that could be described with that adjective.
Roiphe, Katie. (December 2009) The Naked and the Conflicted in The New York Times Sunday Book Review with graphics by Paula Scher.
Readers, dear readers, I know my regulars are sick of hearing about how much I hate pie charts. But I came across Stephen Few’s latest newsletter – Mr. Few is a man who is a professional information graphics guru and he hates pie charts, too. Of course, he is a professional and he doesn’t use the word hate. When I saw his newsletter, a smug smile of satisfaction crossed my face and I thought to myself, “Self, maybe the readers are sick of hearing you complain about pie charts, but they might want to hear how someone else complains about them. Because: Look! He has illustrations!”.
Think of this as graphic art for geeks, abridged from Stephen Few’s newsletter, “Save the Pies for Dessert” from his information graphics educational company The Perceptual Edge.
In the first pie chart, a person might be convinced that pie charts are a decent tool. Just look at how easy it is to see that the light green segment is 25%? Super easy. Without even thinking, it’s obvious, which is the mark of a good information graphic. As for the other segments…same problem as always. Most humans are not good at visually estimating rounded volumes.
See how easy it is to see the 25% segment here? | Stephen Few, Perceptual Edge
And what if we simply rotated the pie a little?
Pie chart rotated - much more difficult to estimate the size of the 25% segment
Now it is much more difficult to get a quick visual estimate of any of the segments, even the 25% piece and all Mr. Few did was rotate the pie. Mr. Few notes that when people use software to generate pies like this, they have little control over what piece of the pie ends up in which position. He explains that our eyes have very few visual metaphors for segmented circles, one of which is the clock: “In the earlier example, our ability to decode the green slice at 25% was assisted by the fact that the green slice began at the 6 o’clock position and extended neatly to the 9 o’clock position.”
Perhaps we solve the problem by just sticking the numerical value right near the slices of pie? He does that and then adds another layer saying, “Why stop here? ….We can solve this problem by directly labeling the slices with both the company names and the values…” which leads to this graphic:
Overly labeled pie charts | Stephen Few
But that leads him to a conclusion that I support which is that this information is much easier on the eye if it’s just in a simple table. The pie itself just confuses things.
Turning the pie into a table | Stephen Few
Much clearer in a table, no? I think so. And so does Mr. Few.
Few, Stephen. (July 2010) “Save the Pies for Dessert” newsletter for Perceptual Edge.
I came across a blog that was new to me, all about information graphics with a Euro-slant, though the New York Times is still well-represented. The writer is Chiqui Estaban out of Madrid and somewhat heroically, he posts in English and Castellano. If you can read Spanish, I recommend that version because the English isn’t perfect. But then again, if you are reading this blog, you understand the value of a good image to communicate clearly, so hopefully you can look beyond a few errors in grammar.
The fact that Sr. Esteban publishes in not only his native language but also in English makes me wonder if it is time for one of the contexts blogs to start a discussion about the primacy of English online. It’s harder to detect if English is your native tongue, but in other places, making a website requires knowing another language, hiring a translator, or using google translate (or Yahoo!s Babel Fish, etc.). And for a blog that is posted everyday, that is tedious (and therefore, may not happen). There is a much larger conversation here. English speakers have hidden privileges online (borrowing and repurposing that term from Lipsitz) that make their e-productions more international than they likely know.
Esteban, Chiqui. Infographic News.
Lipsitz, George. (1998) “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness”. Temple University Press.
© 2010 Graphic Sociology
