Chance magazine ran a contest to create the best illustration for a data set of the effectiveness of three antibiotics on sixteen strains of bacteria. Designer Will Burtin used this data set for a 1950s visualization.
The data set reveals information about MIC ( Minimum Inhibitory Concentration) of three antibiotics against 16 bacterias. Please note here, that the lower the value the more effective a particular antibiotic is considered. The last column in the table shows the most effective antibiotic ( added by me).
The challenge here is to uncover what the data is trying to convey. So what is it, can you find out just by looking at the data ?
This is where Information Visualization comes in.
I made several types of visualization to understand what the tabular data was encrypting.
Viz 1: I noticed an interesting pattern — though neomycin was the most effective among the three, the story was different when the data was
classified as Gram Staining positive & Gram Staining negative. I found that, Penicillin was extremely effective at destroying gram positive
bacteria whereas it was poor at destroying gram negative bacteria. After noticing this pattern, I moved on to encoding the findings
visually.