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