The beauty of data visualization David McCandless

the kills that were all suffering from

information overload or data glut and

the good news is there might be an easy

solution to that and that’s using our

eyes more so visualizing information so

we can see the patterns and connections

that matter and in designing that

information so it makes more sense or it

tells a story or allows us to focus only

on the information that’s important

failing that visualize information can

just look really cool so let’s see this

is the billion dollar a gram

and this image arose out of frustration

I had with the reporting a billion

dollar amounts in the press that is

their meaningless without context five

hundred billion for this pipeline 20

billion for this war it doesn’t make any

sense so the only way to understand it

is visually and relatively so I scrape

to load a report figures from various

news outlets and then scaled the boxes

according to those amounts and the

colors here represent the motivation

behind the money so purple is fighting

and red is giving money away and green

is profiteering and what you can see

straight away is you start to have

different relationships the numbers you

can literally see them but more

importantly you start to see patterns

and connections between numbers that

would otherwise be scattered across

multiple news reports and we point out

some that I really like this is OPEX

revenue this green box here 780 billion

a year and this little pixel in the

corner three billion that’s their

climate change fund Americans incredibly

generous people over three hundred

billion a year donated to charity every

year compared with the amount of foreign

aid given by the top seventeen

industrialized nations at one hundred

and twenty billion and then of course

the Iraq war predicted to cost just 60

billion back in 2003 and the mushroomed

slightly Afghanistan and Iraq mushroom

now to three thousand billion so now

it’s great but now we have this texture

we can add numbers to it as well so we

say well the new food comes out to see

African debt how much of this diagram do

you think might be taken up by the debt

that Africa owes to the West

let’s take a look so there it is 227

billion is what Africa owes and the

recent financial crisis how much of this

diagram might that figure take up that

what does that cost the world take a

look at that douche to think is the

appropriate sound effect from very much

money

11900 billion so by visualizing this

information we turned it into a

landscape that you can explore with your

eyes a kind of map really a sort of

information map when you’re lost in

information an information map is kind

of useful so I want to show you another

landscape now we need to imagine what a

landscape of the world’s fears might

look like let’s take a look

this is mountains out of mole hills a

timeline of global media panic

so our label is for you in a second but

the height here when they point out is

the intensity of certain fears in as

reported in the media let me put them

out to this swine flu pink bird flu SARS

brownish here remember that one the

millennium bug terrible disaster these

little green Peaks are asteroid

collisions

and in summer here killer wasps

so these are what our fears look like

over time in the media but what I love

and I’m a journalist and what I love is

finding hidden patterns I love being a

date detective and it’s a very

interesting and odd pattern hidden in

this data you can only see when you

visualize it let me highlight it for you

see this line this is the landscape for

violent videogames as you can see

there’s a kind of odd regular pattern in

the data Twin Peaks every year if we

look closer we see those Peaks occur at

the same month every year why well

November Christmas videogames come out

and there may well be an upsurge in

concern about their content for April

isn’t a particularly massive month for

videogames why April well in April 1999

was the Columbine shooting and since

then that fear has been remembered by

the media and echoes through the group

mind gradually through the year you have

retrospectives anniversaries court cases

even copycat shootings all pushing that

fear into the agenda and there’s another

pattern here as well can you spot it see

that gap there there’s a gap and it

affects all the other stories why is

there a gap there you see where it

starts September 2001 when we had

something very real to be scared about

so I’ve been working as a data

journalist for about a year and I keep

hearing a phrase all the time which is

this data is the new oil a data is a

kind of ubiquitous resource that we can

shape to provide new innovations and new

insights and spore around us and it can

be mined very easily it’s not a

particularly great metaphor in these

times especially you live around the

Gulf Mexico but I would perhaps adapt

this metaphor slightly and I would say

the data is the new soil because for me

it feels like a fertile creative medium

in over the years online we’ve laid down

a huge amount of information data we

irrigated with networks and connectivity

and it’s been worked and tilled by

unpaid workers and governments and all

right

kind of milking the metaphor a little

bit but it’s a really fertile medium and

it feels like visualizations

infographics data visualizations they

feel like flowers blooming from this

medium but if you look at it directly

it’s just a low numbers and disconnected

facts but if you start working with it

and playing with it in a certain way

interesting things can appear in and

different patterns can be revealed let

me show you this can you guess what this

data set is what rises twice a year once

in Easter and then two weeks before

Christmas has a mini peak every Monday

and then flattens out over the summer

I’ll take answers chocolate you might

want to get some chocolate in any other

guesses shopping yeah retail therapy

might help sick leave yet you’ll

definitely want to take some time off

should we see

so the information guru lee byron and

myself we scraped 10,000 status facebook

updates for the phrase breakup and

broken up and this is the pattern we

found people clearing out for spring

break

coming out very bad weekends on the

Monday being single over the summer and

then the lowest day of the year of

course Christmas Day who would do that

so there’s a Titanic amount of data out

there now I’m presidentís but if you ask

the right kind of question or you work

it in the right kind of way interesting

things can emerge

so informations beautiful data is

beautiful I wonder if I could make my

life beautiful and here’s my visual CV

I’m not quite sure I’ve succeeded pretty

blocky colors aren’t that great but I

wanted to convey something to you you

know I started as a program and then I

worked as a writer for many years about

20 years in print online and in

advertising and only recently if I

started designing and I’ve never been to

design school I’ve never studied arts or

anything I just kind of learned through

doing and when I started designing and

I’ve discovered an odd thing about

myself I already knew how to design but

it wasn’t like I was immediately

brilliant at it but more like I was

sensitive to the the ideas of grids and

space and alignment and typography it’s

almost like being exposed to all this

media over the years had instilled a

kind of dormant design literacy in me

and I don’t feel like I’m unique I feel

that every day all of us now are being

blasted by information design it’s being

poured into our eyes through the web and

we’re all visualizes now we’re all

demanding a visual aspect to our

information and there’s something almost

quite magical about visual information

it’s it’s effortless it literally pours

it in and if you’re in navigating a

dense information jungle come across a

beautiful graphic or a lovely data

visualization it’s a relief it’s like

coming across a clearing in the jungle

and I was curious about this so it led

me to the work with

Danish physicist called tour North

Rhonda’s he converted the bandwidth of

the senses into computer terms so here

we go this is your sense is pouring into

your senses every second your sense of

sights is the fastest it has the same

bandwidth as a computer network then you

have touch about the speed of a USB key

and then you have hearing and smell

which is the throughput of a hard disk

and then you have poor old taste which

is like rarely the throughput of a

pocket calculator and that little square

in the corner not 0.7% as the amount

we’re actually aware of so a lot of your

vision is pouring that bulk of is visual

and it’s pouring in it’s unconscious and

the eye is exquisitely sensitive to

patterns in variations in color shape

and pattern it loves them it calls them

beautiful it’s the language of the eye

and if you combine the language of the

eye with the language of the mind which

is about words and numbers and concepts

you start speaking two languages

simultaneously each enhancing the other

so you have the eye and then you drop in

the concepts and that whole thing it’s

two languages both working at the same

time so we can use this new kind of

language if you like to alter our

perspective or change our views and we

ask you a simple question with a really

simple answer who has the biggest

military budget it’s gotta be America

right massive 609 billion in 2008 607

rather so massive in fact that it can

contain all the other military budgets

in the world

inside itself gobble gobble gobble

gobble gobble now you can see Africa’s

total debt there and the UK budget

deficit for reference so that might well

chime with your view that America is a

war mongering military machine out to

overpower the world that it’s huge

industrial military complex but is it

true that America has the biggest

military budget because America is

incredibly rich country in fact it’s so

massively rich that it can contain the

four other top industrialized nations

economies inside itself it’s so vastly

rich so its military budget is bound to

be enormous so to be fair and to alter

our perspective we have to bring in

another data set a data set is GDP or

the country’s own

who has the biggest budget as a

proportion of GDP let’s have a look that

changes the picture considerably other

countries pop into view than you perhaps

weren’t considering and America drops

into eighth you can also do this with

soldiers who has the most soldiers it’s

gotta be China of course 2.1 million

again chiming with your view that China

has a military regime ready to you know

mobilize its enormous forces but of

course China has an enormous population

so if we do the same we see a radically

different picture

China drops to a hundred and twenty

fourth it actually has a tiny army when

you take other data into consideration

so absolute figures like the military

budget in a connected world kind of

don’t give you the whole picture they’re

not as true as they could be we need

relative figures that are connected to

other data so that we can see a fuller

picture and then that can lead to us

changing our perspective as Hans Rosling

the master my master said let the data

set change your mindset and if they can

do that maybe can also change your

behavior take a look at this one I’m a

bit of a health nut I love kind of like

taking supplements and being fit but I

can never understand what’s going on in

terms of evidence

there’s always conflicting evidence

should I take the procedures were taking

wheat grass so this is a visualization

of all the evidence for nutritional

supplements it’s this kind of diagram is

called a balloon race so the higher up

the image the more evidence there is for

each supplement and the bubbles

correspond to popularity as regards to

Google hits so you can kind of

immediately apprehend the relationship

between efficacy and popularity but you

can also if you braid the evidence sort

of do a worth it line and so supplements

above this line are worth investigating

but only for the conditions listed below

and then supplements below the line or

perhaps not worth investigating now this

image constitutes a huge amount of work

we scraped like 1,000 studies from

PubMed the biomedical database and we

compiled them in greater than law it was

incredibly frustrating for me because

I’d a book of 250 visualizations to do

for my

and I spent a month doing this so I had

only filled two pages but what it points

to is that visualizing information like

this is it’s a form of knowledge

compression it’s a way of squeezing an

enormous amount of information and

understanding into a small space

and once you’ve curated that day and

once you clean that day and once it’s

there you can do cool stuff like this so

I convert this into an interactive app

so I can now generate this application

online this visualization online I can

say yeah brilliant so it’s it spawns

itself and then I could say well just

show me the stuff the effects heart

health

so let’s filter that out the heart as

filtered out so I can see if I’m curious

about that I think no no I don’t want to

take any synthetics I just want to see

plants and and just show me herb some

plants we go all the natural ingredients

now this app is spawning itself from the

data the data is all stored in a Google

Doc and it’s literally generating itself

from that data so the data is now alive

this is a living image and I can update

it in a second new evidence comes out I

just change a row on a spreadsheet

doosh again this the imagery recreates

itself so it’s cause it’s kind of living

and but it kind of can go beyond data

and it can go beyond numbers I like to

apply information visualization to ideas

and concepts this is a visualization of

the political spectrum an attempt for me

to try and understand how it works and

how the ideas percolate down from

government into society and culture into

families into individuals instead

beliefs and background again in a cycle

what I love about this image is it’s

it’s made up of concepts it explores our

worldviews and it helps us it helps me

anyway

to see what others think and to see

where they’re coming from it feels just

incredibly cool to do that and what was

most exciting for me designing this was

that when I was designing this image I

desperately wanted this side the left

side to be better than the right side

being on a journalist left leaning

person

but I couldn’t because I would have

created a lopsided biased diagram so in

order to really create full image I had

to honor the perspectives and on the

right hand side at the same time kind of

uncomfortably recognize how many of

those qualities were actually in me

which is very very annoying and

uncomfortable but not too uncomfortable

because there’s something unthreatening

about seeing a political perspective

versus being told or forced to listen to

one it’s actually you capable of holding

conflicting viewpoints joyously when you

can see them it’s even fun to engage

with them because it’s visual

that’s what exciting for me seeing how

data can change my perspective and

change my mind midstream beautiful

lovely data so just to wrap up I want to

say that it feels to me that design is

about solving problems and providing

elegant solutions an information design

is about solving information problems

and it feels like we have a lot of

information problems in our society at

the moment from the overload and

saturation to the breakdown of trust and

reliability and runaway skepticism and

lack of transparency or even just

interesting this I mean I find

information just too interesting it has

a magnetic quality that draws me in so

if visualizing information can give us a

very quick solution to those kinds of

problems and even when the information

is terrible the visual can be quite

beautiful and often we can get clarity

or the answer to a simple question very

quickly like this one

the recent Icelandic volcano which was

emitting the most co2 was at the plains

or the volcano the grounded planes or

the volcano so we can have a look we

look at the data and we see yep volcano

meter 150,000 tons the grounded plane

would emitted 345,000 if they were in

the sky

so essentially we had our first

carbon-neutral volcano

and that is beautiful thank

you