How do you engage people with data? How do you make them care and pay attention and remember anything about a particular piece of data? One way is dressing the data up as an information graphic. Another might be to get people to play a little game with the data. Nick Diakopoulos and colleagues have built a fascinating research prototype of what this might look like. The idea of gamification…
As newspaper graphics go, scatterplots are a fairly advanced technique. They tend to show a reasonably large amount of data as single points, and they require the reader to have an idea what to look for. Most newspapers never bother using scatterplots for that reason, which is really too bad. With some explanation, a scatterplot can be a very effective means of displaying data, and in particular to allow the…
Information graphics are meant to carry meaning, so that readers can learn something about data, facts, or processes. But what does it mean to inform? And how does the goal of informing in information graphics differ from analytical visualization? A key idea in visualization is that of externalized memory or externalized thinking: Using pen and paper to multiply large numbers is easier than doing the same thing entirely in one’s…
