May 19, 2013
Winners of a student datavis competition
From the University of San Francisco. The winners were all interactive maps, showing, respectively: pollution, population change, and child mortality.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Having tried to look at these visualisations and not succeeded due to not having an up-to-date browser at work it makes me wonder how widely useful these are if you need to be absolutely up to date in your browser.
Seems similar to when people use colour in graphs and don’t recognise that it may display that way for someone else. Or worse still, if printed in black and white it becomes unreadable. I try to make my graphs work in black and white as they are generally easier to see patterns.
OK its easy to demand someone use colour or have n up to date browser butif that means they then don’t EVEN look at the visualisation then what is the point?
12 years ago
Richard,
There are certainly tradeoffs, both in using modern web standards that may not be available everywhere and in using technologies like Java or Flash that may be disabled on some systems.
It depends a lot on the audience. I would think that the majority of the people who are likely to be interested in that sort of visualisation would be using a sufficiently-recent browser, but clearly you do exclude some people. I read a blog post recently by someone (I can’t remember the source) who had found that browsers which couldn’t cope with the D3 Javascript library for interactive graphics had just fallen below 10% of his visitors, so he was going to start using them.
It’s different if you have to make something accessible to everyone, but even there the best solution may be multiple versions, as we do with alt-text for visually-impaired users.
12 years ago
Thomas,
I agree there are trade-offs, but the trade-offs are to be considered on the basis of who you want to be your audience. I would hope that people doing what they regard as info graphics are checking that they are getting the information to the people who would want to know. Or should know, which is probably more important.
I suppose I am influenced by my job where we are supposed to inform the NZ population. Not that I think some of the StatsNZ infographics work (e.g 6 May one on fish consumption in NZ).
Since I am not web-programming literate I merely wonder if it could be possible to monitor who had clicked on your graphic and how many have worked and how many haven’t. As a statistician one of my first thoughts is collecting data to enable the analysis, which can lead to decisions.
To paraphrase a U.S. colleague “If it’s worth doing it’s worth montoring how well you are doing it.”
12 years ago
The browser name and version, which are supplied automatically to the website in the HTML request and collected by many websites, should tell you what works and what doesn’t. I certainly hope that anyone displaying `production-quality’ interactive graphics is monitoring that information.
It’s good that some people are exploring the new features, though — eventually we will all have these features, and more idea of what can usefully be done with them.
12 years ago