Graphic Sociology

http://www.datapointed.net/

Data Pointed

I experienced the vastness of the internet today, stumbling across Data Pointed which is a not-new blog featuring original data visualizations. Why haven’t I come across it before? I wish I knew the answer to that as well as to the related question: how many other interesting data visualizations sites are out there that I do not know about?

What you see above is the most recent post at Data Pointed by Stephen Von Worley. He produces sophisticated graphics across a wide array of subject areas. Just so happens that this one is about the inter-relationship of the income distribution and the tax distribution which is of keen interest to social scientists, and policy people in particular. I find this visualization to be beautiful looking but a little hard to read. Each year is represented by a line, that line is drawn through all of the income brackets you see along the x-axis. As the line passes through these income brackets it changes both color and thickness. Thick red lines indicate areas in which people are paying more than their share of taxes; thin blue lines are areas in which people are paying less than their share of taxes. Von Worley had this to say:

“A modified Reagan-era tax system lingers to this day. To his credit, Dubya did reduce taxes on very low earners, so they’re no longer getting hammered. But, the people at our economy’s core – the full-time workers earning between $20,000 and $150,000 a year – still pay at up to double the rate of the ultra-wealthy, relative to what history suggests they should.”

Personally, I had a hard time drawing that message out of the graphic, despite the fact that it is so beautiful and elegant that I was compelled to stare at it and read the explanation until I could figure out how it worked.

McDonald’s Distances in the US

Von Worley himself notes that Data Visualization was not the popular success he had hoped, at least not at first. [Note: Graphic Sociology isn't exactly a success in terms of page traffic, but it has a core of steady followers generating a four-digit count of unique page views per week.] Data Visualization got popular after Von Worley created the map graphic below that uses blobbiness to indicate distances between points on the US map and the nearest McDonald’s. The farthest you can get from a McDonald’s in the US is 107 miles and you would be in South Dakota.

Distance to nearest McDonald's in the US | Stephen Von Worley

Does the map work?

I am not entirely sure the map is working – again, it is beautiful. Beautiful is compelling and being compelled, I wanted to spend time looking at it. I also love that it kind of looks like fat globules. How appropriate and subtly political. We also end up with a very good proxy for American population density. Not bad. But what would have been even more awesome is if we could tell this was a distance map without having to read the caption. I want to know that there’s a McD’s at the center of each blob and that what I’m supposed to notice is the distance I need to go to get from the darkness to the light. (In my version, I might have had the centers of the blobs be dark and the peripheries be light but I’m guessing it wouldn’t read as well visually no matter how well it fits with my understanding of McD’s as a morally shady place.)

References

Stephen Von Worley (15 March 2011) Shifting Burdens: U.S. Taxes By Income Level Over The Years at Data Pointed Blog.

Percentage of US citizens holding passports, by state | Andrew Sullivan

Passport background

In 2008 as part of the war against terror, US citizens were required to have a passport to travel to countries like Canada and Mexico that had previously allowed passport-free travel. US citizens could drive or walk into Canada and Mexico with a driver’s license and be allowed to drive or walk right back in. In 2011, we see from this map that even now, not all US citizens have passports, not even close. Getting a passport is time consuming, costly, and generally requires some evidence that the person applying for the passport intends to travel outside the US. That last requirement is kind of a no-brainer, why would anyone want to go through the effort to obtain a passport if they never planned to leave the US?

What works

Always skeptical about mapping data that could appear in a table or chart, I have decided that I’m neutral on this particular use of mapping as a presentation device. If the map had included Canada and Mexico rather than just making the US appear to float in space, I would probably have been more convinced that the map was the way to proceed with this information. If I had created a chart or a table, I would have divided the US states into two groups: those that border foreign countries and those that do not. Have a glance at the map again and you will see that the states bordering foreign countries have higher percentages of passport holders, on average, than those states that do not border foreign countries. Florida and Illinois do not border foreign countries and yet they both have high percentages of passport holders. In the Florida case, I would say it’s almost as if Florida borders foreign countries since so many of its near neighbors are island nations – Haiti, the British Virgin Islands, the Dominican Republic, and so forth.

Illinois is home to Chicago, a destination for immigrants and immigrants often leave family in other countries whom they would like to visit. Thus, they will need passports. The same is true for most big cities – New York and California (home to New York City and Los Angeles) also have large immigrant populations and large numbers of passport holders. On the other hand, Saskia Sassen might point out that what’s going on in Chicago, LA, and New York is that all of these cities are global cities, hubs of activity in Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE industries). These FIRE industries are global industries and require their workers to travel internationally at higher rates than the same kinds of workers in other industries.

It would be interesting to compare the rates of passport holders to both the rates of first generation immigrants and the proportion of workers in the FIRE industries in all these states.

What needs work

As I mentioned, presenting this information as a map begs to have Canada and Mexico included. In order to visualize the story here, it would be helpful to see what is happening at the borders, to remind ourselves that the US does not simply float in space. It is geographically specific and it matters that some states have international borders and others do not. Sometimes these borders ARE the story and I think when we’re talking about passport holders, the borders are important.

If this information were to be presented as a set of bar graphs, we would risk some information overload since there would be 50 bars. But that might be alright if it became instantly visually clear that the border states have higher rates of passport holdership than the interior and non-bordering states. Plus, with a bar graph, the numbers could have been layered on each bar (and really, they could have been layered on each state in the map) so that we would be able to get a more precise calculation. Simply knowing that we are working with some number in a 10% range is kind of sloppy for my tastes. That’s just me. And sometimes with information like this it’s silly to try to get granular because the data collection method could have a fairly wide margin of error. Though I should hope that the feds know who is holding passports. I suppose people could apply for them in one state and then move to another state. The feds may not know about moves following passport application and that could introduce some fuzziness.

Note: I tried to go to the original source of the map several times but the page timed out repeatedly. Therefore, I ended up citing Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic since that is where I encountered the map and it is a website that I believe you can visit whereas cgpgrey.com/blog is not visit-able. If I had been able to visit I might have been able to figure out where the passport data came from in the first place – presumably some federal department.

References

Sullivan, Andrew. (8 March 2011) Map of the Day: How many Americans have a passport, by state in The Daily Dish at The Atlantic online. [Graphic by cgpgrey.com/blog]

Sassen, Saskia. (2001 [1991]) The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Meta Infographic | Think Brilliant

What works

Using an infographic to deconstruct and critique trends in infographic design is a bit more clever than what I do – using text to deconstruct and critique infographics – though I still think there is good reason to do what I’m doing.

Even though Think Brilliant does a good job of spelling out some of tropes of information design that often populate information graphics, they leave some of these pesky problems obvious-yet-unarticulated. In particular, I love the way they split the word DIAGRAMS in odd places so that it would conform to the shape of the text box it inhabits. I very much dislike that sort of trick. The text need not conform so tightly to its text box that it stops looking like a word and starts looking like an advertisement for the typeface.

Click through on the image or the caption and read it over yourself. Notice that Think Brilliant agrees with me about maps – they get used at times when it seems as though there is barely any geographical information being displayed. Sure, cities exist somewhere in the global geography, but if the viewer is supposed to be comparing one city to the next, it is usually far easier to do that using a graph, table, or chart than a map. If you want to tell me about the weather, go ahead and use a map. But if there is no good reason to use a map rather than a chart or table, using that map often dilutes the message by implying that geography is the primary element determining the quantities in question when it is rarely the case that geography is primary.

I also dislike 3D graphs because they make it harder for the eye to connect the bar back to the axis in for purposes of interpretation. And even though it often seems that infographics have the number one purpose of being pretty, in fact, their number one purpose is to make complicated multi-variable situations easier to interpret.

Well done, Think Brilliant.

Friday afternoon thoughts about infographics vs. writing

Writing about something generally requires a linear interpretation because it is nearly impossible to read two things at the same time and it isn’t all that easy to read something that does not have a singular flow. I guess one could read unordered, bulleted lists…but that’s tedious and inelegant. Making an infographic does not require linearity. It does require just as much thought and craft as writing. Where the story is mostly linear, by all means do us all a favor and write about it. Unless you cannot write and then you are welcome to try your hand at infographic creation (ahem, NYU undergrads, that bit about not being able to write well includes more of you than you think).

In the best of all possible worlds, graphics will be used alongside writing in order to offer readers/viewers multiple ways to understand and engage with your work. Social scientists generally present multi-layered research findings based on sometimes complex sets of assumptions. Asking the reader to get with the program and hold all those moving parts in mind at once can be a lot to ask. For all we know, the reader has not consumed anywhere near the amount of caffeine that they need to operate at peak efficiency. Help the reader. Tell the same story with your words, graphics, and images. This goes for both qualitative and quantitative methods. Just because a project is based on interview and ethnographic data does not mean it is impossible to make graphics or acceptable to skip their inclusion in your work.

As you can see from the graphic above, people can see through designerly gimmicks. Folks want meaningful information in their graphics. Better to create a simple infographic that risks being a bit plain than to skip creating a graphic (or to turn a simple graphic into something that makes ridiculous use of 3D, color, maps, typeface, layout, or any other graphic design trope applied without any value-add in the meaning department).

Human Development Index Map

Massachusetts Human Development Index

What works

Mapping the Measure of America is a social science project that deliberately includes information graphics as a communication mechanism. In fact, it is the primary tool for communicating if we assume that more people will visit the (free) website than buy the book. And even the book is quite infographic dependent. I support this turn towards the visual. I also support the idea that they hired a graphic designer to work with them. Often, social scientists do not do well when left to their own under-developed graphic design skill set. Fair enough.

The website presents a unified view of the three images above. I couldn’t get them to fit in the 600 pixel width format, so I presented them one at a time. I encourage you to go to the website because one of the greatest strengths of this approach is the interactivity and layering. I happen to have picked Massachusetts, but each state plus DC has it’s own graphics available. There are other charts and whatnot available, but I think that this set of graphics (which you see all at once) are the strongest.

What needs work

Maps. Maps are too often used. Here’s why I think maps are a problem. Look, folks, political boundaries are meaningful when it comes to making policy or otherwise dealing with state-based funding. And that’s about it. Political boundaries occasionally coincide with geographical boundaries, but not always. Geographical boundaries are meaningful for some things – life opportunities may be based on natural resources or on historical benefits accruing to natural resources. But political boundaries and maps are often not all that useful because they imply that the key divisions are the divisions between states or counties or neighborhoods. Like I said, sometimes this is true because funding tends to be like the paint bucket tool – it flows right up to the boundaries and not beyond, even if the boundaries are arbitrary or oddly shaped. But where the issues are not heavily dependent on funding, thinking in terms of political boundaries makes it harder to see patterns that are organized along other axes. For instance, I wonder what would have happened if some of these categories – education, longevity, income – had been split between urban, suburban, and rural areas. Or urban and ex-urban areas if you prefer that perspective on the world as we know it.

In the end, I think the title is both accurate and disappointing: “Mapping the Measure of America”. Figuring out how to do information graphics well means figuring out which variables are the key variables. In this case, it seems that the graphic options might have determined the display of the information. Maps are easy enough – they appear to offer a comparison between my local and other people’s local. Those kinds of comparisons offer readers an easy way to access the information because everyone is from somewhere and there is a tendency to want to compare self to others. But ask yourself this: to what degree do you feel that state-level information is a reflection of yourself? Do you see yourself in your state?

References

Burd-Sharps, Sarah and Lewis, Kristen. (2010) Mapping the Measure of America with the American Human Development Project. Site design credit goes to Rosten Woo and Zachary Watson.

Clothing and Footwear, Global Spending 2007

Electronics, Global Spending 2007

Recreation, Global Spending 2007

What Works

I have been thinking about other ways to work with maps lately, and I stumbled upon this interactive consumption map created by the folks at the New York Times using numbers from Euromonitor International, 2007. This graph was certainly a product of a moment in time – I don’t see too many people making consumption graphs like this one these days. They might be making line graphs where the total amount of consumer spending or consumer confidence is of immense concern to finance people who are eager for the next growth period in the economy. (I’m not saying that only finance people are looking forward to economic growth, just suggesting that they are the people who spend a lot of time studying consumer behavior as they anticipate the growth period. The rest of us might be looking at our own retirement statements or home values or paychecks.)

This map approach to spending is great because the graphic designers – Hannah Fairfield, Elaine He and Kevin Quealy – realized that maps are just schematics. It isn’t necessary to stick with a country’s shape, but it is nice to keep them in about the same positions relative to one another. Freeing each country from the shape of its political boundaries allows each square country to change dimensions in direct relation to total consumer spending within a sector. The color tells us what this works out to in terms of per capita spending. If you clicked through to look at the actual interactive graphics you’ll find that if you mouse-over a country, you can see the dollar amount of the total spending for whatever sector you happen to be viewing.

The strength of this graphic is that it strips away unnecessary detail to focus your eye’s attention on the most salient information in an easy-to-digest kind of way. This is a huge improvement over the sort of thing that I see all too often (and have included a little global poverty example here). My eye is terrible at assessing relative areas when the shapes are so irregular like this. Much better to just keep the relative positions of the countries and give them square shapes that can be quickly, effortlessly scanned for the sake of comparison.

Human Poverty

What needs work

I would have put the per capita spending in the roll-over as well. Right now it’s just the country’s total spending. I also would have thought about a way to represent all the countries that don’t even make this map. Something understated and subtle – a sprinkling of grey dots? But then those countries might look like dust…still thinking about that.

The other thing I might have liked would be to have either gone completely grey scale (preferred) or to have selected a single color for each sector with increasing saturation as spending increases. The second approach would have made more sense if the product was a series of print graphics, but the approach they actually took and the grayscale approach are better for this sort of interactive graphic in which the viewer sees only one at a time.

References

Hannah Fairfield, Elaine He and Kevin Quealy. (4 Sep 2008) “What your global neighbors are buying”. Business Section of the New York Times. Using Euromonitor International figures.

Fairfield, Hannah. (4 Sep 2008) Guccis or Gadgets? Business Section of the New York Times. [related article that ran with the graphic]

Xanax Nation | GOOD Mag. Transparency Blog

What works

Um, so, I’m trying to think of what is working here. I guess we see that there are about 10 psychiatric drugs, that lots of people appear to be receiving treatment for anxiety (heck, two wars, an economic crisis, trapped Chilean miners, BP’s oil spill…all this anxiety makes sense to me). We are meant to believe that this represents a huge and possibly stifling example of big pharma. But really, this graphic doesn’t say that to me. It says “lots of people are anxious and choosing to take prescription drugs to cope”.

Xanax Nation without the map

What needs work

Just for some crazy antic fun, infographic style, I whipped out my digital crop tool and got rid of the map just to see what we would lose. Clearly, we lose some fun. Almost all the pretty colors are gone. But the information? It’s all still there. The map was being used as a giant and rather useless crutch in this case. This is a particularly egregious case, but there are many instances of maps that don’t encode any information that is useful for the debate of the topic at hand. Ask yourself: what did the map do? Was there any variation contained in the map? Was the dataset in question geographically oriented in any way? No. No, it was not.

Thanks to Austin Haney, Sociology grad student at Kent State for sending this our way.

References

Drugged Culture GOOD magazine, Transparency Blog.

(2010) One Nation Under Xanax in Psychiatric Times.

Tokyo Metro Map (click to embiggen)

Away message

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.

New York mapped by geotagged photos

Just thought this was cool

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.

Migration into and out of Los Angeles, CA (2008)

What works

This is an interactive graphic situation so to get the most out of it, I recommend clicking through to forbes.com and playing around.

What works is that we can see a lot of internal migration between Los Angeles and other west coast cities as well as between LA, Florida, and the DC-NYC-Boston corridor. I know plenty of bi-coastal folks so the picture matches up with my experience. To get the proper context, I suggest you click through and pick some rural counties to see how much people tend to move from small place to small place and from big place to big place but not so much from very small to very big or vice versa.

Overall, what the interactive graphic ends up showing us is that people move quite a bit. The map gets saturated with lines.

Man, we can really make some cool graphics – and interactive ones at that – with the ridiculous capacity of desktop computers these days. This is a data-driven graphic that would have been nearly impossible not that long ago.

What needs work

There is no comparison for this graphic. I can’t tell if all this migration is more than normal, trending up, trending down, or anything of that nature. Sheer volume at one time can generate lots of questions but it doesn’t answer many.

I’d also be curious to know if the movers are evenly spread across the life course. Plenty of people move to go to college and then again when they leave college, or so I think. And there has been plenty of ink spilled about retirees moving south from places like Chicago and Minneapolis. Then, about ten years ago, I remember reading stories about the plight of the managerial class having to move around within their multi-national corporations to keep progressing in their companies all through their mid-life. With all those half-baked hypotheses, I would love to see how life stage impacts internal migration.

References

Bruner, Joseph. (15 June 2010) Map: Where Americans Are Moving at forbes.com.