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The beauty of data visualisation

Hypothesis: Making data more visual makes it easier to see patterns and connections, and easier to understand.


In his new book, Information Is Beautiful [Amazon UK] (in the US, it's retitled The Visual Miscellaneum [Amazon US]), McCandless and his cadre of info designers take a spin through the world of visualized data, from hard stats on politics and climate to daffy but no less important trends in pop music.


TEDTalks has their own YouTube channel.

I originally saw this presentation at the ScienceOnlineLondon conference in August 2010. Even though McCandless is not an inspiring speaker, I was impressed with many of his data visualisations whilst a few others were either confusing or misleading. But as he states, all of his graphics were beautiful.

Clearly, McCandless is on to something here, but I think that these data must be presented more precisely, with an eye towards making them decipherable to those who wish to make direct comparisons, and make them quickly. For example, when McCandless presents the military budget data, he plots his numbers by area, instead of using a bar graph, so it's difficult for a casual observer to readily appreciate the differences. But that said, the "scare story" visualization is excellent.


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