Data Visualisation
Political Topic
This chart presents who is fighting whom on the Syrian land.
This chart was provided in a magazine called Slate which is a online magazine that covers politics from a liberal perspective. Since the chart is presented in a political magazine, then the source took its information from its very own archives and previous articles. The chart has visuals that range from: “Friends” which is presented by a green happy face, “Enemies” which is presented by a red poker face, and “it’s complicated” with a yellow face that is confused. The information that came along the chart does not say how they have categorised or differentiated friends, enemies and the “it’s complicated”.
Because this might sound vague to people, Slate has added an informative section in which the user can have by clicking on the face.
The chart was used twice in the magazine, the first time was in 2014 and the second time in 2015. In the 2014’s issue Slate has made an error in which they came up with a correction later on, and they added “Due to a production error, this chart originally misstated that Saudi Arabia and Syria are friends. They are enemies. Also, the chart misstated the relationship between Egypt and Syria as the relationship between Egypt and Saudi Arabia.” BIG BIG mistake, makes you question their credibility and reliability. Although this chart can be pretty informative if someone wants to learn the ABC’s of the Syrian war but, it is presented from a certain political point of view and it faraway from being objective. On another note, the information provided on the status of each party and its opponent should be more thorough because this goes back to history, the reader should learn where all of that came from.
Another downside to the chart, is that it does not give the war its actual weight; it reduces it to graphics and makes the people who are dying from the war “invisible” and this abstractness takes away from the war’s social seriousness.
The simplification of this chart was not thoroughly explained as to WHY the categories were made as such, and since in different times many groups changed their behaviours, so whoever is a friend with Al Qaida for instance, might not be tomorrow. So what is to be critiqued here is the dissection of the relationship between each and every group. (also, some might be “friends” with the other only to make a trap.) Therefore, the data here is completely subjected but in how it is presented it might get to some audience thinking that this is just objective information translated into “simple” visuals to be better explained…(false!)
Social Topic:
Mona Chalabi, a data journalist who works for The Guardian has undergone a study on the gender wage gap depending on where people work, hold old they are, their educational background and race or ethnicity. She explains that in order to collect the data she went through many process which first is The Census Bureau which she considers a “reputable source”, then she goes to another source and checks if the numbers are similar. Now, visually this chart is not very appealing, it is rather straight to the point. This chart doesn’t include all details possible, for instance the year is not provided, maybe she could have shown how this has changed (or not changed) throughout the years. Also, the source of each source should be tested in order to provide that we can trust the source. This chart reinforces that sexism is always obvious in data. What the chart makes “invisible” are the reasons for this discrimination.
What this data lacks, is how it was collected, who was surveyed and what is it trying to say from what is beyond just the numbers? Does those number signify a racism issue coming back to the surface? And if this is what it was supposed to show, then maybe she could have been more specific and say which states were more racist then the others.
Cultural Topic:
This Chart was posted in South China Morning Post, it represents the number of native speakers for language that acquire more than fifty million speakers. Only 23 of the seven thousand language in the world have more than 50 million native speakers. The black borders stand for these 23 languages. The chart also shows where the speakers are located. This chart fails to show that there is a political history behind the language that are mostly used.
On another level, the combination of geographical mapping of languages distribution is interesting. However this map fails to show the portrayal of how languages can be internally divided into different dialects and versions. Also, population size makes is a tricky aspect when it comes to calculating such percentages, because each country that has its own language, also has its own population size.
