News and Notes from PolicyViz - Issue #17
News and Notes from PolicyViz - Issue #17
Hi all,
Well, we had just a taste of summer here in Virginia over the weekend with temps in the mid- to high-90s. Let me tell you, umpiring behind the plate was quite the workout!
On the dataviz front, the thing that caught my eye last week was the How America Lost One Million People story in the New York Times. In the animation to the piece, 1 million dots animate to an area chart and animate to a map. Some folks on Twitter were remarking that simply animating dots doesn't convey the magnitude or the grief of the pandemic.
There were some thoughtful discussions on Twitter about that sentiment with some disagreeing (see great threads from Will Chase and Amanda Makulec, and a blog post from Francis Gagnon). But it seemed, again, that the debate boiled down to the question of, what's the point of the visualization? What is it trying to do? Is it trying to tug at our heart, make us feel the loss of one million people? Or is it trying to convey the number of people who have died?
Personally, I thought the goal of the piece was to try to convey the magnitude of the pandemic, and to that end, I thought it did that incredibly well (not to mention some of the other great dataviz inside the story). I didn't gasp in horror when the dots animated--we all know this pandemic has taken too many lives--but transitioning between the background, time series, and geographic distribution was, I thought, well done.
Later in the week, the Times published Voices of a Grieving Nation and 1 Million Deaths, 13 Last Messages, and the Washington Post published Cut Short, all of which highlighted individual stories from people and their families. The Voices piece featured audio recordings from family members of people who died from COVID. The 13 Last Messages piece consisted of actual text message exchanges between people who died from COVID and their families. And the Cut Short piece pulled sentences from individual obituaries to highlight a single death in each month of the pandemic. Each story was hard to read (or listen to) and each, I thought, helped convey the magnitude of the deaths and the sorrow it has left in its wake.
I wonder whether we should start viewing pieces like these--especially from news organizations who are publishing multiple pieces every day--as part of a collection of work, rather than one-off stories. Looking at the three Times pieces together gives a different perspective of the pandemic--an overall view of the data using animation, a text-driven piece with individual messages, and an audio piece from family members. Together, that is quite an impressive story.
Of course, we as the public didn't know on Sunday that there were going to be three pieces of content by Monday afternoon, but in retrospect, this "collection" is interesting to see.
I don't think this comes with any final "lessons-learned." As a community, we'll continue to have these debates and discussions, which is healthy to help us all be better at communicating data.
Thanks and take care,
Jon
Episode #218: Michael Friendly & Harold Wainer
Michael Friendly is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Professor of Psychology, founding Chair of the graduate program in Quantitative Methods at York University, and an Associate Coordinator with the Statistical Consulting Service. He received his doctorate in Psychology from Princeton University, specializing in Psychometrics and Cognitive Psychology.
Howard Wainer is an independent statistician and author with experience in educational testing and data visualization. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1968. He has taught at The University of Chicago, Princeton University and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He was employed by the Educational Testing Service from 1980 until 2001 and was the Distinguished Research Scientist at the National Board of Medical Examiners from 2001 until 2016.
I wanted to chat with Michael and Howard to learn more about their work and their book A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication. I also got some good details about their favorite data visualizations!
Episodes of the PolicyViz Podcast come out every other week, with a little break in the summer. If you'd like to support the show, check out Patreon or Winno.
What I'm Reading
Books
Making Sense of Field Research, Sheila Pontis
Writing on the Job, Martha Coven
Articles
Integrating Annotations into Multidimensional Visual Dashboards, Badam, Chandrasegaran, and Elmqvist
More than Meets the Eye: A Closer Look at Encodings in Visualization, Robert Kosara
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Check out some videos on YouTube!
There was an interesting table recently in the Washington Post, so I gave it a shot in Excel. As I was working on it, I was thinking, "I wonder how I would do this in Tableau." Of course, being pretty new at Tableau, I had no idea how'd I go about it. So, I reached out to Kevin Flerlage and he readily agreed to create a step-by-step video in how to make the table in Tableau. You can check out both videos on my YouTube channel. (And if you want to learn about these videos when they're published, consider subscribing!)