Infovis & the Power of Vision
What is Infovis? How is its purpose different from statistical graphics? What is a bad infovis and what is a good one? What do bad statistical graphics look like? What are some suggestions to improve them? Gelman and Unwin ,through the first reading, and Broman ,in his post, interestingly try to answer these questions and even more for this week.
Infovis is also known as information visualization or infographic. It is basically intended to draw attention of public who are not normally attentive to that particular topic. Meanwhile, statistical graphic is a tool for researchers and data analysts for seeking patterns in data and displaying them. Although its usage is not limited to those groups, it is less popular comparing to infographics. A statistical graph is produced by a statistician, a scientist, however an infovis is an outcome of a designer, an artist. While a statistician can assume that they have the attention of their readers, a designer needs to absorb reader’s attention first. This issue makes infovis and statistical graphs really different. Nevertheless, according to Gelman and Unwin, a general rule to improve both infovis and statistical graph is to avoid cramming what can be better demonstrated in two or more graphs into a single one. Also, Gelman and Unwin provide a bunch of successful examples for infovis, such as Wordle tool and The Baby Name Wizard, and bad ones, such as Florence nightingale’s coxcomb.
When I explored The Baby Name Wizard, I immediately remembered Google Books Ngram Viewer. It is a graphical search engine that charts frequencies of any set of key words separated by comma, found in sources printed in years between 1500 to 2008 in English, simplified Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. Nevertheless, it is criticized due to inaccurate OCR and incorrect dates and categories.
Talking about infographics and data visualization reminds me of the importance of big picture and the necessity of viewing whole from above or a distance. Sometimes, focusing on details for a long time can be frustrating and misleading, specially in times of difficulty. Developing a personal ability to view thing from a bigger point of view can be really useful in solving problems of our everyday life. A good example of this issue can be vision. Joel Barker in his book, Power of Vision, fascinatingly demonstrates the importance of this skills. Progressive ancient nations, successful students from deprived families, survivors of WWII form Nazi's death camps have one thing in common: positive vision of their future. Barker brings some examples of his book into a short movie, which concisely stresses the real power of having positive vision. I strongly encourage you to watch this 30-minutes clip if you don’t have time to read the whole book.
