From the awful to the sublime
The New York Times has been breaking a lot of ground with innovative graphics. One of their graphic designers, Matthew Ericson, recently gave a talk on their approach. This Sunday’s paper had examples of great and awful charts.
First, the awful. In an article on global warming, this appears:
It’s a little hard to see what’s going on there. That’s the problem. In print, this chart takes up almost an entire page. On the web, it has to have a special viewer.
It’s a classic example of a bad ink to data ratio. The data density is low, most of the ink is used for show, not for information. The graphic is showing historical and projected carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. I’m not against good design – but I think this display fails on its own terms, to help the viewer understand the nature of CO2 emissions. Instead of just making it an easy to read line chart, it turns the one-dimensional value (emissions in a given year) into a square, putting us in the position of comparing all these different sized squares. We get some sense there’s been an acceleration in emissions, but it’s obscured by the rising smoke.
Taking the same data (up to 2004) but charting it, we can get more detail (including the major components of the emissions):
Even this isn’t ideal. It would be nice to see the data normalized for world economic output, for population, etc., as well as then broken into smaller pieces (geographic region or country), and annotated for major events (e.g., World War II).
Just to be clear, I’m not hating on this chart’s author, Bill Marsh, in general, just this specific chart. I liked his water article from July but this one didn’t work for me.
Now to the sublime. Same newspaper, same day, different story.
Before going further, I should note that this coverage partially suffers from the standard problem with political reporting in the mainstream media. The Presidential election is treated as an exciting horse race, with candidates jockeying for position (e.g., editors rarely assign reporters to write about the issues the candidates are all ignoring). That said, like a good action movie, the following chart can be appreciated on its own terms (click on it to see the full version):
This chart makes wonderful use of the concept of a small multiple. Learn how to read one piece of it, and you can read the whole thing. You can study it for several minutes and notice interesting patterns. There are some great annotations as well to explain outliers. Some observations:
- Democrats are hammering away on Bush and Iraq while talking hawkishly about Iran.
- Republicans are trying to wrap themselves in Reagan and tax cuts.
- The Republicans (mainly) attack abortion; the Democrats ignore it.
- The Democrats talk about the environment; the Republicans ignore it. But neither group is talking much about climate change specifically.
And so on. More than just a clever idea, this chart is a wonderful display of information. 11 candidates, 21(!) debates, and 16 words or phrases combine to create over 2000 numbers. Because of this chart, they can be easily compared and analyzed.
Our goal at Visible Certainty is to make it easier to create such presentations. I don’t know what software the authors, Jonathan Corum and Farhana Hossain, used, but they had to do a lot of this work by hand. Even after you assemble the data set from word analysis of the debate transcripts, there’s a lot to do to create so many charts and lay them out. We’re going to help with all of that.
One last note. There was another set of charts accompanying the debate analysis.
In the newspaper, confined to black and white, they are very hard to read. Online, with color and interactivity, they are easier to understand. They try to show how much each candidate is referring to each other candidate (and the corollary, who is getting the most mentions).
Front-runners tend to get mentioned (attacked) more. So it’s no surprise that Clinton and Obama, along with Giuliani and Romney, get the most mentions. Judging by the bipartisan mentions she’s getting, Hillary Clinton is considered the overwhelming favorite for the Democratic nomination. You can also see how the front runners get more time to talk during the debates. I’ll leave the implications of that for later.
There’s a lot of information being packed in here, but in print, it’s hard to read and online, it’s hard to compare. Perhaps instead of the circles, a series of bar charts would work. One set would show how many times each candidate has been mentioned in each debate, as well as a summary bar chart to compare total mentioned of each candidate. The circle charts don’t make it easy to see whom each candidate is talking about, but you could show that with a series of bar charts as well (or one time series line chart showing the relative rise and fall of each candidate).
But I can’t show that to you easily – I don’t, yet, have the data.
