http://forums.flowingdata.com/ Strength in Numbers en Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:43:12 +0000 http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/5#post-391 Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:37:43 +0000 nathany 391@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>This is from Tom, a FlowingData reader:</p> <p>I work for a company that makes Geographic Information System software. I got this table into our database and was able to link it to the geographic dataset of the Counties of the U.S. by FIPS code. I made a couple maps of the number of people in each county who are living in poverty. Note, it is not the poverty rate, it is the number. The first image is a thematic map showing the good old light blue to purple color ramp divided up into seven categories by Jenks natural breaks. The second is a cartogram of the same data using the same classification and color ramp. A cartogram is a transformation where each polygon is resized to have an area that is proportional to some value of interest. The cartogram was made using the method developed by Michael Gastner and Mark Newman (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Vol 101, Number 20, pp 7499-7504, May 18, 2004). Mark Newman has more information about this and downloads at <a href="http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/cart/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/cart/index.html</a>. There is a great website that uses Mark's program at <a href="http://www.worldmapper.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.worldmapper.org/</a>.</p> <p>Looking at thematic maps always makes me think of the book &quot;How to Lie with Maps&quot; by Mark Monmonier. Look at the thematic map. It says, &quot;Things aren't so bad. Look at all that light blue.&quot; Look at the cartogram. Almost all the light blue is squashed out by the darker more purple colored counties. You can load both .jpeg files in Microsoft Office Picture Manager, and switch back and forth. You can comment at great length at the things you see. The huge size of Los Angeles County. How most of the light blue counties are barely more that their outline in size, but how there are many light blue counties that do have some area to them. Remember, area is people - people in poverty. See how the big counties seem to be clustered around large cities, but how there are very large counties in the very southern tip of Texas with a lot of people in poverty but no city over 350,000 people nearby.</p> <p>[attachment=391,85] </p> <p>[attachment=391,86] </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/5#post-372 Sun, 01 Feb 2009 19:51:32 +0000 whatype 372@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>Hi everyone,</p> <p>First of all I must say that I really appreciate your comments about my entree. This has been a really nice challenge and I've learn a great deal from your opinions and works. If I was to do it again taking the same path, I would do it a lot better. Thanks!</p> <p>I wanted also to public agree with what Luca Masud wrote about the 'goal' of a visualization. I'm an art editor on a newsmagazine and I've been trying to show the 'power' of good visualization to some journalist. I do believe that in a magazine or a newspaper, this days you have to show more (or less, but with greater effect) then the basic graph. Sometimes, it's not about the best way to show data, it's about the best way to engage your readers with that data.</p> <p>For me, when going for visualizations like the one Luca did (and yes, I'm a huge fan of DensityDesign) a publication is giving more to the readers. Readers nowadays are more willing (and more capable) of 'reading' not so simple charts. I find that information visualization is giving us journalist the tools to 'tell' stories, most of the times, enabling us to 'mix' different data and giving ways for our readers to gain knowledge of a given problem.</p> <p>So, it's just (as always with design) a matter of finding the best way of solving a problem, of finding a way to communicate something. It is my belief that a 'simple', 'tradicional' graph might not always be the best way to achieve this. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/5#post-371 Sat, 31 Jan 2009 12:54:38 +0000 nathany 371@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>Ha, the quants are a tough crowd. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/5#post-370 Sat, 31 Jan 2009 03:48:56 +0000 Luca Masud 370@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>"But even so, I would have missed the conclusion without the text in the lower right corner of the contextualization."</p> <p>Oh, come on, if one takes his time at checking the peaks and what those points so far away from the others mean (by looking at the axes and the red indicators) he's going to draw the same conclusion. Give me credit at least on this one. Only this one. =D </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/4#post-369 Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:47:28 +0000 Tim 369@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>Personally, I don't think the graphic from Luca was effective. </p> <p>I still can't understand the "ink blots". </p> <p>For example, the transparency makes more colors on the chart than in the legend which confused me from the start. Also the long lines from each state to each data point are difficult to follow.</p> <p>Try to see for example the overall poverty rate for Louisiana. ??</p> <p>OK so maybe the intent was to highlight a single conclusion, rather than use the chart to look at other points. So I can overlook my objection above.</p> <p>But even so, I would have missed the conclusion without the text in the lower right corner of the contextualization.</p> <p>So for me this is not effective. If you wish to highlight a single conclusion, the text does it better than any of the graphical elements. If you want to use the graphical elements to understand more than one point, it is too hard.</p> <p>To me it tried to be a bit of both and succeeded at neither.</p> <p>If this was for mass consumption in a newspaper for example, I think a better way to demonstrate the conclusion in a graphic would be to simply show:</p> <p>----<br /> District Of Columbia compared to all US states:</p> <p>Poverty Ranking = #2 (%people in poverty)<br /> Wealth Ranking = #1 (GDP per capita)<br /> ---</p> <p>Those two facts alone convey the conclusion better than the ink blots chart I think, and ranking is a term everyone understands.</p> <p>Of course, someone from somewhere other than DC reading that might wonder "how does my state compare". Then you need to show all the states. In that case I think two columns would work better. First column ranks by poverty. Second ranks by wealth. Then draw lines to connect the same state in each column. Steep lines will show the disparity. It would be much simpler.</p> <p>Just my opinion, I don't mean to sound like a harsh critic. Respectfully submitted comment!! Well done to everyone, I enjoyed looking at them all. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/4#post-364 Fri, 30 Jan 2009 08:12:09 +0000 Luca Masud 364@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>I read your article and I am at one with you on this but that's not what I was referring to. </p> <p>Let's take your chart, for example. The one you did here. For sure it's much better than mine in seeing all the data (although I'm not sure that a line chart is the best visualization: there's no time trend here). What kind of new knowledge a generic reader get from that graph? What kind of new subtle correlation between data? </p> <p>You can explain him what to look for by writing an article under your chart but, maybe, you can do it visually too. And it's just what I'd try to do. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/4#post-363 Fri, 30 Jan 2009 07:53:19 +0000 JonPeltier 363@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>@Luca -</p> <p>Don't apologize for your English. You communicate your ideas clearly.</p> <p>You're absolutely correct, that the display has to be matched to the audience. But I think we don't give "generic people" credit. If the visual is clear and the textual description is adequate, people will understand more than publishers generally seem to expect. A little color is good to get their attention, but one must take care not to let the design obscure or distort the information. I discussed that on my blog in <a href="http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/bad-bar-chart-practices-or-send-in-the-clowns/" title="Bad Bar Chart Practices, or Send in the Clowns" rel="nofollow">Bad Bar Chart Practices, or Send in the Clowns</a>. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/4#post-362 Fri, 30 Jan 2009 04:42:41 +0000 Luca Masud 362@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>@hadley: I did try many different graphics. But, after all, we all didn't have much time to work more on data and since I'm not an analyst maybe I'm much slower than you in seeing data correlations. For sure there were other things one may have considered but when I incorporated the GDP I was thinking, someway, that I was playing "unfair" by putting more data than the one given (which I found - no offense, Nathany - a little uninspiring: no vertical insight at all). But I used it anyway because it seemed to me a good intuition.</p> <p>What says Cloister is truth: it seems to me that staticians, or people like Jon Peltier (from whom I have a lot the learn) sometimes forget that not everybody of us are able to read data and the many nuances of graphs. I'm trying to learn but I cannot expect that every people in the world is going to.</p> <p>That's why data integrity is indeed important but, still, you always have to remember who are you talking to (the target). </p> <p>For example, let's take the case in which the graph is aimed to explain something to generic people and it's going to be published on a magazine or newspaper.<br /> In this case it has absolutely no sense designing a perfect graph that is great in understanding the system when read by staticians. Much better is communicating what the staticians saw in that graph, taking the hand of the reader and guiding him through all the data, telling him what to look at. Obviously you can do it in a bad or a good way, and one must try to avoid all kind of data distortions and gross mistakes (like trying to compare thousands of pie charts! =P ).<br /> But still, in that case, data really comes after the message you want to convey: what's the point of a perfect but useless graph?. And I rather prefer showing less data and going straight to the point (I'm not trying to defend my graph here, it is indeed full of mistakes).</p> <p>Of course the opposite is true when the target works as a tool and it's aimed to staticians, analyst, etc. They do know how to read graphs. They do know how to see correlations. That's why they surely don't need strong guidelines as would do a generic magazine reader.</p> <p>And sorry if my English is not that good. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/4#post-361 Thu, 29 Jan 2009 23:16:54 +0000 cloister 361@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>@nathany:</p> <p>Fair enough, but then I again have to wonder what you guys mean by "letting the data shine through."</p> <p>Can you explain what that means in such a way that is distinct from "presenting data so as to convey a particular fact or insight"?</p> <p>Not being a statistician, I'm not seeing it. Which is not to imply that it isn't there; I'm a communications guy myself, so for me there's no reason to have data unless you can learn something from it, and communicate that with others. </p> <p>I'm not trained to look at data like a statistician, so I'm genuinely curious as to what the alternate viewpoint is. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/4#post-360 Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:46:42 +0000 nathany 360@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>RE: technical participation, yeah, that worries me too. I'm just going off feeling, but it feels like that the technical crowd really likes to go off defaults on whatever their program gives them. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/4#post-359 Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:39:11 +0000 hadley 359@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>@nathany: yup, definitely surprised - the majority of submissions look like they have been created by artists not scientists or engineers. I'm not saying that this a bad thing, but it worries me that there appear to be few more quantitative people using visual tools and practising their visualisation skills (maybe they are all too busy doing more important things)</p> <p>@cloister: it's easier to speak in specifics than generalities, and in this case I think many people came to the challenge with a preconceived notion of what the visualisation should show: that poverty is bad and we should do something about it. That may be appropriate in this case, but in most cases it is not: you need to understand the data before trying to summarise them in a simple fashion. You need to be clear headed and dispassionate in an analysis, and not immediately jump to an emotive presentation. </p> <p>@luca: of course you have to make decisions about what to highlight in a single graphic. However you can only make a good choice if you have considered many possible options. If you present your first thought you may miss many important features. The design must come after the analysis - you will only find out the message after trying many possible graphics (otherwise you are just producing propaganda). </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/4#post-358 Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:48:37 +0000 JonPeltier 358@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>@Nathan: </p> <p>"[1] What I did like about Luca's though is that he did a little bit of sifting, found something he thought was interesting, and then rolled with that. [2] I also appreciate the incorporation of GDP."</p> <p>2. GDP was a nice covariable to incorporate. I didn't have time to think of anything to could look up to add to the analysis. </p> <p>1. Again, what I find noteworthy is that a geographically small metropolitan area did so much differently than the geographically much larger states. The second map posted by Marc Levy brings up this point. Based on number of people in poverty per square mile, I see a large number of dots which are larger than DC: NYC, LA, Chicago, Detroit, Phoenix, Portland OR, Houston, DFW, to pick off a few. This measure may not be comparable with the percentages in the file you supplied, but it shows that the DC data is out of place with the states data. The fact that it was such a blatant outlier in Luca's graphic should have also demonstrated this.</p> <p>And now I'll shut up! </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/4#post-357 Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:53:04 +0000 Luca Masud 357@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>Yeah, but it simply depends on what you want to say and communicate. There may be a lot of data in a phenomenon but usually visualizing and talking about all of them can be completely useless. There's design before visualization: you have to make decisions about what you want to highlight with your graph and then starting graphing in the proper way to deliver your message.<br /> That's what I think Cloister wanted to point out. </p> <p>Obviously this doesn't mean that you have to do poor graphs. You can perfectly stay "true" to every single rule of good graphing but still decide to convey a certain message by not displaying some of the data that is not useful to solve your problem.</p> <p>It's all about the starting question. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/4#post-354 Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:20:39 +0000 nathany 354@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>Hmm, I'm actually more with Hadley on this one. Having worked with statisticians (uh, I am one) and designers, there's a pretty big difference between letting the data shine through and highlighting something in the data.</p> <p>The NASA example supports what Hadley said about EDA. The engineers, the initial analysts, or whatever looked at the data from one angle, but if they had explored a bit, then they would have gotten some different results. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/4#post-353 Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:30:26 +0000 cloister 353@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>@hadley: "Many of them present a strong moral message rather than letting the data shine through."</p> <p>This is starting to get pretty philosophical, and I think that it would be nice to see Nathany write up a blog post about it and ask for comment from the whole community in a separate thread, but:</p> <p>I have to ask, is there really any difference between presenting a strong message (I edit out the word "moral" because the message doesn't necessarily have to be a moral one) and "letting the data shine through"? I mean, really. What's the difference?</p> <p>Case in point. One of Tufte's classic examples is the O-ring burn-through data presented to NASA decision makers before the Challenger accident in 1986. Engineers knew that O-rings had a problem with eroding due to hot gasses within the solid rocket boosters, and that this problem was worse when the weather was cold.</p> <p>Not being avid readers of FlowingData, when they presented the data, they organized it by time--launch date--rather than by ambient temperature at the time of launch.</p> <p>Since launch temperatures are basically un-correlated with the calendar date, the pattern of "more burn-throughs when the weather is cold" was just not visible. If memory serves, Tufte reproduces the visuals from the presentation in his first book to make that point, and he's right. The decisions makers couldn't see it, and ordered the launch to proceed.</p> <p>Re-organize the data with temperature as the x-axis variable, and the trend is as clear as the cold winter day that killed those seven astronauts and grounded the shuttle fleet for the next several years.</p> <p>The engineer's message--indeed, the message that the data held--was obscured due to poor visualization. The data didn't, in your words, "shine through". And neither did the message.</p> <p>To me, that's what "letting the data shine through" means: making the message within the data as obvious as possible. It means turning raw data into knowledge that can be acted upon.</p> <p>Otherwise, what's the point? If all you want is to show the data, just print out the raw spreadsheet. Data galore, but completely useless. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/4#post-352 Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:22:19 +0000 dsimmons 352@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>@all I had some ideas about what to do for this. I'm glad I didn't spend the time, they would have been total 'yawners' in comparison. Well done, all.</p> <p>@Nathan,</p> <p>please, please don't have different threads for different submissions. Yes, it gets a bit cluttered and lengthy and that's anti-thetical, but there are many more of us that scroll through the thread admiring the great work. The many more of us would have to go back to every thread to check them.</p> <p>The habit of using the @sign is a great solution </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/4#post-351 Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:51:48 +0000 nathany 351@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>@hadley were you really that surprised? FD readers are pretty diverse in that sense, so I pretty much expected the mix, which I really like. It's that mix of emotion and logic that I think is the most interesting. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/4#post-349 Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:33:23 +0000 hadley 349@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>I'm also surprised by the number of very attractive but not terribly informative visualisations. Many of them present a strong moral message rather than letting the data shine through. This probably reflect a fundamental difference in how authors imagine their work being used. I picture my graph being used in a meeting of sober government bureaucrats deciding where to spend their money to have the most effect. Others obviously imagine their work being used to rally the public to fight the evils of poverty. </p> <p>I also wonder at the absence of data exploration - is it not interesting the child, adult and elderly poverty rates are all roughly the same proportion of the overall poverty rate across states? My feeling is that most people spent a lot of time on a single representation of the data, rather than exploring many possibilities. </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/4#post-348 Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:52:39 +0000 nathany 348@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>@nimao - in any case, very nice (and creative) work :) </p> http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/visualize-this-poverty-rate-by-age-in-america-jan-14-to-jan-20/page/4#post-347 Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:58:34 +0000 nimao 347@http://forums.flowingdata.com/ <p>@Ben</p> <p>First of all, thank you Ben<br /> However the map is designed to be implemented on a large panel and smile :( next to the name of the state in the white space under the polaroid indicate the total percentage of the state (perhaps it would be better to use numbers but I wanted avoid as much as possible the use of the numbers).<br /> However they are all things that I simply forgot to write cause I finished the map very late... :) </p>