We love our infograms, don’t we, the digerati, the twittering classes? These information graphics, or data visualisations. I don’t think there’s another field of the social sciences quite so keen on complicated graphs that half-explain themselves and suggest transparency and half are a subtle appeal to the imagination.
Because these images are machine-generated, there’s a temptation to believe that they are transparent. That they are mirrors of hard-and-fast facts. They are not. No image is unmediated nor undesigned. Someone decided to style the information in this way, with this scope and format, these colours and these dimensions. And there’s an agenda in that, whether overt or unrealised: this is how we visualise this stuff and how we want you to visualise it, too. They fulfil an ideological function.
For this post about data-visualisations, I’m going to focus on the visualisation part of the term (“You can picture it like this“), rather than the data part.
Why are these the images that are selected and why do they look the way they do?
The Connected Web
These types of images are especially popular. I think that when you sign the application for the International League of Social Media Consultants, you must pledge to include them in every slide deck.
This is what the web looks like, we’re told. The visualisation holds a nod to the Powers of Ten and the Mandelbrot Set, a web of terrifying complexity that will reveal infinitely more layers of complexity the closer you zoom in. This web is far bigger than you know, or can possibly know. They may remind you, too, of the molecular diagrams of complex carbohydrates that you never quite understood properly at school.
It looks like this because today’s web is about interconnectedness, not just in the sense of wires under the streets, but the connections of tribes of influence and ultimately of every individual on the web – each of which is subtly different (unless, of course, they are not). The colours are interesting, too. Note the preponderance of blue (unvisited links) and red (alert!) in these pictures.
Why do Web 2.0 presentations nearly always start with this image? Because they need to disabuse you of the notion that the web looks like this:
You don’t need a £1000-a-day consultant for a web with one input box and two buttons, one of which is almost never used. No; understanding the web requires science beyond your ken and difficult Maths.
The Tag Cloud
I’m actually a big fan of tag-clouds – as I’ve mentioned before. I think they encourage exploration, individual journeys and also give an instantly understood visual fingerprint to a site.
So two thumbs-up for ones like this:
The ones that I’m less keen on sometimes look a bit like this:
Or, even worse, like this:
The video shows CNN creating – and then seriously discussing – a ‘word cloud’ in its terminology, made from President Obama’s press conference on March 24. Not a brilliant starting point. Tag clouds do not provide a lot of analysis for documents. They flag up the main topics. They do nothing to establish sentiment or tone. If Obama’s speech had consisted entirely of questions, rather than statements, the tag cloud would look exactly the same.
By the way, UK’s Daily Telegraph immediately copied the idea, to our shame, in order to ‘analyse’ the Chancellor’s budget speech last month:
The Friend Wheel
The Friend Wheel became one of the enduring visual images to try to explain Facebook and the Social Graph – the network’s term for the interconnectedness of your friends in a social network – and why advertising on it will work (click for big).
What the hell does this show? Well, that my friends on Facebook sit in three broad groups: the green ones are the social media whores – they all know each other as well as me. I’ll probably see them at a London networking event once a month. The blue ones seem to know each other, but not the greens. They are perhaps specialists or old work colleagues. The pinks are less likely to know the greens and blues – maybe family and friends who came a little later to the network?
What you realise after a while, is that everybody’s friend wheel looks exactly the same. That’s what Facebook is like. People who don’t do the whole social media thing probably won’t have as much of a green crowd, but for them, school friends or people within a large corporation might take their place.
Again, it seems like over-complication and scientification of some common sense about what Facebook is like. This, more familiar, view of your friends doesn’t look like you need a specialist firm advising you:
But, oh!, the colours and so many lines!
Last Words
I am not remotely as cynical as this might imply. I remain an enormous fan of data visualisations, despite all of this, and advise a visit to Visual Complexity on a weekly basis to get your fix. But do be alert: don’t forget that this is an art as much as a science. ;-)
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Actually I don’t find too many of those word-cloud-visualisation-type things too useful, even the tag-cloud which at least feels like a useful list. I think that for the most part they just look pretty, and moreover they appear to like themselves for that precise reason.
I once saw a map of the world showing the intensity of internet access across countries, with levels of access, density of internet traffic and global connections glowing with varying degrees of brightness.
This was for the most part a ‘so what’ kind of map, but it showed one interesting thing quite clearly, and that was the gaping internet ‘black holes’ in Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Iran, Afghanistan, China and several other countries.
I’m also excited by the dynamic, realtime reviews of web content that Jonathan Harris produces with his remarkable sites. But quite how they help to actually ‘understand’ anything rather than just amuse and stimulate us with their technical sophistication and sheer entertainment value, I remain unconvinced. Perhaps the amount of data is too vast, and there is only a vague editorial viewpoint.
Don’t get me wrong though, I love his work! Check him out on TED: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_harris_tells_the_web_s_secret_stories.html
You’re right, Malcolm. And ‘usefulness’ is a criteria that, while not always the most important, shouldn’t really every be forgotten.
Very pretty and fun, though, as you say.
PS. There’s a stark difference between these and the learning role that graphics have in Hans Rosling’s presentations at TED 06 and 07.
PS. There’s a stark difference between these and the learning role that graphics have in Hans Rosling’s presentations at TED 06 and 07.