4 hours to remember

The temporal data I typically work with is best aggregated to relatively large chunks: months, quarters, years. But recently, life threw a situation at me where minutes became very important. Time since then has been a bit of blur; it's hard to believe a couple of weeks have passed already. While I'm doubtful I'll forget the details, I thought it would be fun to visualize these life-changing hours and minutes:

Still, I think this might be one of those situations where a picture says more than even a dense data visualization ever could:

Avery, our amazing Christmas surprise, is doing well. He remains in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit due to his 7-week-early arrival, but is getting better and bigger by the day. We are in awe of and in love with him and cannot wait to bring him home.

the functional art

It's a little beat up and has scraps of paper sticking out in various directions marking pages I want to refer back to: it's my copy of the functional art by Alberto Cairo, and it's been everywhere with me over the past month - from LA to DC to Milwaukee, and several places in between (yes, that probably means I'm a slow reader). I finished it on my latest plane ride home. In a word: it was awesome.

As the subtitle declares, the focus of the book is information graphics and visualization. Alberto has a conversational, super accessible writing style. His research is augmented with his extensive experience in data journalism and the book is filled with illustrative stories and examples. the functional art begins with a section on Foundations - what visualization is and does, the importance of building a narrative structure, and introduces a visualization wheel to evaluate competing priorities. It then moves into Cognition - discussion of the eye, the brain, and how people see. The third section focuses on Practice - the infographic creation process and interactive graphics. While I enjoyed the entire book, the final section, Profiles, was my personal favorite - it recaps Alberto's interviews with various practitioners working with infographics. I also enjoyed examining the various examples throughout the book and seeing the progression from sketches to final product.

The book was inspiring, as is Alberto's work in general. I had the pleasure of speaking with him a couple of months ago, when he was getting ready to launch the first massive online course on an Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization through the Knight Center. This 6 week course filled up quickly, so a second was recently announced that begins in January (details here). Alberto also teaches at the University of Miami and blogs at www.thefunctionalart.com. His passion in this space is clear and from what I've seen, permeates through all that he does.

For those interested in infographics or data visualization in general, I highly recommend the functional art; you can purchase a copy of it here.

I like [candy] bars better than donuts

I've recently hosted a couple data visualization challenges (here and here), but it's been a while since I've made a contribution to one. That is about to change. Recently, Naomi Robbins announced a makeover challenge in her Forbes blog (details here - open until 12/9 if you want to participate). The challenge included two visuals. My discussion and makeover of each follows.

Makeover #1: I like [candy] bars better than donuts...
The first visual included two donut graphs (the pie chart's even less effective cousin; see here for a related post on donut charts):

It took staring at this for awhile for me to figure out what was going on. Based on the title, it seems we're meant to compare the segments of the donuts across the two charts. This is not an easy comparison - in addition to having to measure angles and areas (something our eyes aren't very good at), the slices are also in different places due to the difference in magnitudes within the donuts, making the comparison even more challenging. 

I also question the takeaway called out - that LinkedIn referral traffic is 16x higher for B2B companies. The proportion it makes up of total is 16x higher, but that's not necessarily the same thing, since total referral volume for B2B vs. B2B could be very different. Unfortunately, we aren't given the context of total referral volume here. I also hesitate to call out an increase like this, since the initial comparison point is 1% - a small number, making the 16x increase not necessarily as impressive as it at first sounds.

To Gavin's dismay, I'm going to go with a bar chart here (but bear with me, no bar charts for the next makeover, I promise!). Yes, I use bar charts frequently. It's because they are so easy to read! Here's where I landed:

In this case, we can easily compare the relative breakdown of referrals by source for B2C vs. B2B. For me, Facebook's dominance across both comes across more clearly here than it did with the pies. (I'm still questioning the use of %s here vs. absolute numbers, but given that's the data we had to work with, I'll let that concern go for now).

Makeover #2: Cole's first slopegraph

The second visual set forth in the contest is a table, accompanied by the challenge to "suggest a graphical representation" of the information displayed. The table shows expenditures for homeowners vs. renters in 1986 vs. 2010 across a number of categories:

In a recent workshop I facilitated, one of the participants asked about using line graphs when you only have two time periods and whether this is advisable. I think if I'd been asked a couple of weeks ago, I would have probably responded no. But I recently finished reading Alberto Cairo's The Functional Art (my book review post is forthcoming), where he features a couple examples of this done really well. I drew an example on the board in the workshop to illustrate when this can work. Here's my first go at creating one for real:

For me, the interesting story here is around which categories increased (depicted in blue above) and which decreased (grey). I think the slopegraph depicts this well. To reduce the business of the visual, I chose not to show all of the categories depicted in the original table. I omitted Entertainment and Other (since they both remained relatively flat) and included a note on this in the footnote. I also chose not to show the subcomponent pieces of the categories included in the table, but rather included some comments on what I found to be the interesting observations from those on the visual directly.

I'd love your feedback on the above visuals. I think in both cases, the story comes across much more clearly in the madeover visuals compared to the originals. If you have other ideas on how to visualize this data, leave a comment with your thoughts (or even better, submit an entry to the challenge!).