Week 2 – The Truthful Art | The Pudding: How to Make Dope Shit Part 2
The Truthful Art: Intro — Chap. 2
This week I read the introduction and chapters 1 & 2 of Cairo’s The Truthful Art. Cairo starts off his book with the metaphor of the island of knowledge which describes the human quest for knowledge and understanding — the larger the island of knowledge becomes, the longer the shoreline of wonder, in other words, the more knowledge we attain, the more there is to learn. His point is that data visualizations help for both society’s island of knowledge and shoreline of wonder to grow — when they are created truthfully.
Cairo then goes onto differentiate candid communication from strategic communication. He defines the primary purpose of candid information graphics: “to enlighten people — not to entertain them, not to sell them products, services, or ideas, but to inform them“. While strategic communications infuses communications issues with an agenda. When I read this section I couldn’t help but to think of this Jimmy Kimmel video:
Which demonstrates how many Americans do not realize that the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare are the same. While many Americans felt favorably about the Affordable Care Act, many of the same people were against Obamacare! This point alone shows the power of strategic communication and how simply marketing a program one way vs. another can change the way society perceives it.
In Chapter 1 Cairo provides us with a nice set of definitions.
He defines the following:
- a visualization is any kind of visual representation of information designed to enable communication, analysis, discovery, exploration, etc.
- A chart is a display in which data are encoded with symbols that have different shapes, colors, or proportions
- A map is a depiction of a geographical area or a representation of data that pertains to area
- An infographic is a multi-selection visual representation of information intended to communicate one or more specific messages
- A data visualization is a display of data designed to enable analysis, exploration, and discovery
- A news application is lets people customize a visualization so that it relates the data that’s present in their own lives
Even though I had heard of many of these before one term I was surprised about was the news application, while I have interacted with many of these, myself, I didn’t realize that was the proper name for them!
Another one of my main takeaways from this chapter was the difference between data visualizations and infographics: Infographics are designed to tell a story while data visualizations enable exploration.
In chapter 2 Cairo goes over the five quality of great visualizations. These 5 qualities are: truthful, functional, beautiful, insightful, and enlightening.
- Truthful visualizations avoid self-deception and are honest with the audience — in Cairo’s charts don’t lie he teaches us many ways to detect if charts are truthful
- Functional visualizations use the appropriate charts maps, etc. according to the tasks you wish to enable. In other words the purpose of the graphic dictates how to shape the information.
- Beautiful visualizations evoke an emotional response — I am currently reading Don Norman’s design of everyday things in which he also points out how “attractive things work better”.
- Insightful visualizations allow for viewers to make discoveries that wouldn’t be possible if the information were presented in a different way.
- Enlightening visualizations change people’s minds for the better.
I liked how the first two qualities: truthful and functional are in the titles of Cairo’s books… I wonder if perhaps one of his next books with be the Insightful Art or The Enlightening Art..
The Pudding: How to Make Dope Shit Part 2
Last week I read Part 1 of How to Make Dope Shit from The Pudding which provided an introduction to the tools that designers use to create graphics for data driven stories. This week I continued on and read Part 2 which focused on the process of designing a visualization and dealing with uncertainty.
Blinderman starts off by pointing out that starting to design a visualization can be daunting –- speaking from experience, this is true. I remember feeling overwhelmed when creating my first infographic for Professor Cairo’s Infographics and Data Visualization course during my first semester of grad school. There’s a lot to consider! What am I trying to communicate? What charts/ graphics should I use? How should I arrange this information? Does it flow? … the list goes on and on. The list also continues to grow when you begin to consider interactive visualizations!
Part 2 of How to Make Dope Shit gives some great tips on how to keep calm and visualize on, many of which overlap with some of the pointers Professor Cairo has given in the past.
Below are Blinderman’s tips:
· Look at visualization- This means learning through observing the work of others and drawing inspiration from past pieces of data visualization that you’ve seen and admired.
· Archive the work that you like- I learned about Sightline, a tool, which allows you to automatically save data visualizations you encounter online through a Chrome extension.
· Think about your message
· Don’t design in code
· Read other people’s code & ask questions!
My favorite part of the article was when Blinderman describes the many iterations of the Diversity in Newsrooms visualization — a visualization we have admired and discussed in class. It’s nice to know that even the pros struggle with these things and we’re not alone as beginners.
