David Andrew: Psychology, Coaching, Higher Education
Individual and organisational psychology, coaching and educational development
Ran the first enhancing visual presentation in lectures workshop today, seemed to go well and evaluation forms were positive.
Some participants asked for more practical examples of how to enhance the presentation of some materials - will do that next time if people send me stuff in advance - if anyone who was there would like me to do something anyway - would be happy to see what I can do.
Number of people interested in using cartoons - will blog something about tools for that soon.
A useful paper on telling stories with data - vis.stanford.edu/files/2010-Narrative-InfoVis.pdf
Number Picture [numberpicture.com] is a web application that enables the creation of custom-made visualizations and infographics through the (re)coding of a collection of open templates. In a way, it takes the concept of social visualization (e.g. Many Eyes) one step further, as it goes beyond offering powerful tools to visualize data to the masses. In addition, Number Picture attempts to crowd-source the creation of the visualization tools themselves, here through the use of templates.
According to the 'About' page, the goal of the service is to provide a "refreshing change to all the millions and billions of bar graphs and pie charts that we see in our everyday lives" and to increase the usage of other visualizations outside of the pie chart, which was invented in 1801 ("Yes, that's right, he [William Playfair] invented the Pie Chart").
Data that can be copied and pasted into the template from Excel, while custom-made templates can be added through the use of Processing.js programming. Few examples are available at the moment, but that should be solved shortly, I guess.
JGraph is a UK company that develops and supports graph visualization software and web services. One of the free services they offer is a diagram creation tool called Diagram.ly. Diagram.ly offers a drag and drop interface for creating diagrams using clip art and pre-drawn shapes. Using the service does not require registration and all of your diagrams can be saved to your local computer in your choice of four formats (xml, png, jpg, or svg).
Applications for Education
Diagram.ly could be a good tool for students to use to create flowcharts of a process or concept. Students could also use Diagram.ly to create mindmaps that use images instead of just words and lines. As registration is not required in order to use the service you can have students using it quickly without losing instructional time to walking students through a registration process.
Social Compare [socialcompare.com] sees a conceptual gap between social networking and visual size comparison. The online tool enables everyone to easily compare the size of all sorts of artefacts, like objects (e.g. iPad vs. iPad 2), persons (e.g. Obama vs. Sarkozy), countries (e.g. USA vs. France) and the like. All visual comparisons can be saved to be shared on social networks or be embedded directly on blog post or website. In addition, size "tables" allow comparison of things that have no visual counterpart, such as Internet browsers, car performance statistics or sports and activities.
Ultimately, Social Compare believes it can become an new social community to create and share easily interactive and collaborative comparison tables. More information also watchable in a short introduction movie below.
See also Sizeasy - Visual Size Comparison
Find Great Data Visualizations at Visualizing.org: "
Visualizing.org is a community site for sharing data visualizations (aka infographics). Anyone can upload their data visualizations to the public gallery. The public gallery is divided into four categories; economy, environment, health, and energy. Visualizations in the gallery can be downloaded, printed, and or embedded into your blog or website. Some of the visualizations in the gallery, such as this one embedded below, are interactive.
National obesity comparison tool <br /><a href="#"><img alt="National obesity comparison tool " src="http://public.tableausoftware.com/static/images/co/contributorstoobesity/Eatyourvegtables/1_rss.png" height="100%" /></a>
Visualizing.org could be a good place to find infographics to use at the start of a research activity. For example, take the infographic embedded above and ask students to research the causes of and impact of high obesity rates on communities.
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Let's Debate the Issue of Aesthetics in Data Visualization... on Television: "
BBC television seems to have embraced informing people of the power (and dangers) of infographics. Several months before Hans Rosling's television documentary 'The Joy of Stats', they even took up data visualization and infographics as a subject of intense debate. More specifically, on a episode of News Night, Information is Beautiful author David McCandless dueled with 'Anti Design' initiator Neville Brody, a 'legendary designer who is the original art director of The Face'.
Interestingly, the actual discussion topic quickly focused on the potential misuse of beauty in data visualization, which ultimately might make them 'too mesmerizing, too beguiling, too pretty' (I confess, I had to look the 2nd verb up). Without much consideration, the moderator put up several infographics of one of the two guests and invited the other one to vent some critiques. What started off with a friendly 'Congratulations David! I would like that on my wall!' quickly shifted into an intellectual argument that nailed the work as the epitome of what should not come out after '25 years of Thatcher locking up culture'. While no-one took the trouble of asking what actually should come out instead, the moderator was quick to remark: 'Are you more coffee table graphics?'
So, in short, if you want to see the utter surprise when a talented and acclaimed information designer is so openly criticized on national television, then watch the movie below.
What should David McCandless have answered instead?
Here is David's own take, as he recently mentioned in an interesting interview at Visualising Data: 'I forgot how TV journalism reduces debate down to two opposing polarities: for and against. Which I think for a topic like information design is a lame approach. How can you be against information design? It's just a technique! So I was caught on the hop a bit and felt quite bemused by what was going on. I thought we might have a debate about its potential and its limitations. But no.'.
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