The beauty of data visualization - David McCandless

the kills that were all suffering from information overload or data glut and the good news is there might be an easy solution to that and that's using our eyes more so visualizing information so we can see the patterns and connections that matter and in designing that information so it makes more sense or it tells a story or allows us to focus only on the information that's important failing that visualize information can just look really cool so let's see this is the billion dollar a gram and this image arose out of frustration I had with the reporting a billion dollar amounts in the press that is their meaningless without context five hundred billion for this pipeline 20 billion for this war it doesn't make any sense so the only way to understand it is visually and relatively so I scrape to load a report figures from various news outlets and then scaled the boxes according to those amounts and the colors here represent the motivation behind the money so purple is fighting and red is giving money away and green is profiteering and what you can see straight away is you start to have different relationships the numbers you can literally see them but more importantly you start to see patterns and connections between numbers that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports and we point out some that I really like this is OPEX revenue this green box here 780 billion a year and this little pixel in the corner three billion that's their climate change fund Americans incredibly generous people over three hundred billion a year donated to charity every year compared with the amount of foreign aid given by the top seventeen industrialized nations at one hundred and twenty billion and then of course the Iraq war predicted to cost just 60 billion back in 2003 and the mushroomed slightly Afghanistan and Iraq mushroom now to three thousand billion so now it's great but now we have this texture we can add numbers to it as well so we say well the new food comes out to see African debt how much of this diagram do you think might be taken up by the debt that Africa owes to the West let's take a look so there it is 227 billion is what Africa owes and the recent financial crisis how much of this diagram might that figure take up that what does that cost the world take a look at that douche to think is the appropriate sound effect from very much money 11900 billion so by visualizing this information we turned it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes a kind of map really a sort of information map when you're lost in information an information map is kind of useful so I want to show you another landscape now we need to imagine what a landscape of the world's fears might look like let's take a look this is mountains out of mole hills a timeline of global media panic so our label is for you in a second but the height here when they point out is the intensity of certain fears in as reported in the media let me put them out to this swine flu pink bird flu SARS brownish here remember that one the millennium bug terrible disaster these little green Peaks are asteroid collisions and in summer here killer wasps so these are what our fears look like over time in the media but what I love and I'm a journalist and what I love is finding hidden patterns I love being a date detective and it's a very interesting and odd pattern hidden in this data you can only see when you visualize it let me highlight it for you see this line this is the landscape for violent videogames as you can see there's a kind of odd regular pattern in the data Twin Peaks every year if we look closer we see those Peaks occur at the same month every year why well November Christmas videogames come out and there may well be an upsurge in concern about their content for April isn't a particularly massive month for videogames why April well in April 1999 was the Columbine shooting and since then that fear has been remembered by the media and echoes through the group mind gradually through the year you have retrospectives anniversaries court cases even copycat shootings all pushing that fear into the agenda and there's another pattern here as well can you spot it see that gap there there's a gap and it affects all the other stories why is there a gap there you see where it starts September 2001 when we had something very real to be scared about so I've been working as a data journalist for about a year and I keep hearing a phrase all the time which is this data is the new oil a data is a kind of ubiquitous resource that we can shape to provide new innovations and new insights and spore around us and it can be mined very easily it's not a particularly great metaphor in these times especially you live around the Gulf Mexico but I would perhaps adapt this metaphor slightly and I would say the data is the new soil because for me it feels like a fertile creative medium in over the years online we've laid down a huge amount of information data we irrigated with networks and connectivity and it's been worked and tilled by unpaid workers and governments and all right kind of milking the metaphor a little bit but it's a really fertile medium and it feels like visualizations infographics data visualizations they feel like flowers blooming from this medium but if you look at it directly it's just a low numbers and disconnected facts but if you start working with it and playing with it in a certain way interesting things can appear in and different patterns can be revealed let me show you this can you guess what this data set is what rises twice a year once in Easter and then two weeks before Christmas has a mini peak every Monday and then flattens out over the summer I'll take answers chocolate you might want to get some chocolate in any other guesses shopping yeah retail therapy might help sick leave yet you'll definitely want to take some time off should we see so the information guru lee byron and myself we scraped 10,000 status facebook updates for the phrase breakup and broken up and this is the pattern we found people clearing out for spring break coming out very bad weekends on the Monday being single over the summer and then the lowest day of the year of course Christmas Day who would do that so there's a Titanic amount of data out there now I'm presidentís but if you ask the right kind of question or you work it in the right kind of way interesting things can emerge so informations beautiful data is beautiful I wonder if I could make my life beautiful and here's my visual CV I'm not quite sure I've succeeded pretty blocky colors aren't that great but I wanted to convey something to you you know I started as a program and then I worked as a writer for many years about 20 years in print online and in advertising and only recently if I started designing and I've never been to design school I've never studied arts or anything I just kind of learned through doing and when I started designing and I've discovered an odd thing about myself I already knew how to design but it wasn't like I was immediately brilliant at it but more like I was sensitive to the the ideas of grids and space and alignment and typography it's almost like being exposed to all this media over the years had instilled a kind of dormant design literacy in me and I don't feel like I'm unique I feel that every day all of us now are being blasted by information design it's being poured into our eyes through the web and we're all visualizes now we're all demanding a visual aspect to our information and there's something almost quite magical about visual information it's it's effortless it literally pours it in and if you're in navigating a dense information jungle come across a beautiful graphic or a lovely data visualization it's a relief it's like coming across a clearing in the jungle and I was curious about this so it led me to the work with Danish physicist called tour North Rhonda's he converted the bandwidth of the senses into computer terms so here we go this is your sense is pouring into your senses every second your sense of sights is the fastest it has the same bandwidth as a computer network then you have touch about the speed of a USB key and then you have hearing and smell which is the throughput of a hard disk and then you have poor old taste which is like rarely the throughput of a pocket calculator and that little square in the corner not 0.7% as the amount we're actually aware of so a lot of your vision is pouring that bulk of is visual and it's pouring in it's unconscious and the eye is exquisitely sensitive to patterns in variations in color shape and pattern it loves them it calls them beautiful it's the language of the eye and if you combine the language of the eye with the language of the mind which is about words and numbers and concepts you start speaking two languages simultaneously each enhancing the other so you have the eye and then you drop in the concepts and that whole thing it's two languages both working at the same time so we can use this new kind of language if you like to alter our perspective or change our views and we ask you a simple question with a really simple answer who has the biggest military budget it's gotta be America right massive 609 billion in 2008 607 rather so massive in fact that it can contain all the other military budgets in the world inside itself gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble now you can see Africa's total debt there and the UK budget deficit for reference so that might well chime with your view that America is a war mongering military machine out to overpower the world that it's huge industrial military complex but is it true that America has the biggest military budget because America is incredibly rich country in fact it's so massively rich that it can contain the four other top industrialized nations economies inside itself it's so vastly rich so its military budget is bound to be enormous so to be fair and to alter our perspective we have to bring in another data set a data set is GDP or the country's own who has the biggest budget as a proportion of GDP let's have a look that changes the picture considerably other countries pop into view than you perhaps weren't considering and America drops into eighth you can also do this with soldiers who has the most soldiers it's gotta be China of course 2.1 million again chiming with your view that China has a military regime ready to you know mobilize its enormous forces but of course China has an enormous population so if we do the same we see a radically different picture China drops to a hundred and twenty fourth it actually has a tiny army when you take other data into consideration so absolute figures like the military budget in a connected world kind of don't give you the whole picture they're not as true as they could be we need relative figures that are connected to other data so that we can see a fuller picture and then that can lead to us changing our perspective as Hans Rosling the master my master said let the data set change your mindset and if they can do that maybe can also change your behavior take a look at this one I'm a bit of a health nut I love kind of like taking supplements and being fit but I can never understand what's going on in terms of evidence there's always conflicting evidence should I take the procedures were taking wheat grass so this is a visualization of all the evidence for nutritional supplements it's this kind of diagram is called a balloon race so the higher up the image the more evidence there is for each supplement and the bubbles correspond to popularity as regards to Google hits so you can kind of immediately apprehend the relationship between efficacy and popularity but you can also if you braid the evidence sort of do a worth it line and so supplements above this line are worth investigating but only for the conditions listed below and then supplements below the line or perhaps not worth investigating now this image constitutes a huge amount of work we scraped like 1,000 studies from PubMed the biomedical database and we compiled them in greater than law it was incredibly frustrating for me because I'd a book of 250 visualizations to do for my and I spent a month doing this so I had only filled two pages but what it points to is that visualizing information like this is it's a form of knowledge compression it's a way of squeezing an enormous amount of information and understanding into a small space and once you've curated that day and once you clean that day and once it's there you can do cool stuff like this so I convert this into an interactive app so I can now generate this application online this visualization online I can say yeah brilliant so it's it spawns itself and then I could say well just show me the stuff the effects heart health so let's filter that out the heart as filtered out so I can see if I'm curious about that I think no no I don't want to take any synthetics I just want to see plants and and just show me herb some plants we go all the natural ingredients now this app is spawning itself from the data the data is all stored in a Google Doc and it's literally generating itself from that data so the data is now alive this is a living image and I can update it in a second new evidence comes out I just change a row on a spreadsheet doosh again this the imagery recreates itself so it's cause it's kind of living and but it kind of can go beyond data and it can go beyond numbers I like to apply information visualization to ideas and concepts this is a visualization of the political spectrum an attempt for me to try and understand how it works and how the ideas percolate down from government into society and culture into families into individuals instead beliefs and background again in a cycle what I love about this image is it's it's made up of concepts it explores our worldviews and it helps us it helps me anyway to see what others think and to see where they're coming from it feels just incredibly cool to do that and what was most exciting for me designing this was that when I was designing this image I desperately wanted this side the left side to be better than the right side being on a journalist left leaning person but I couldn't because I would have created a lopsided biased diagram so in order to really create full image I had to honor the perspectives and on the right hand side at the same time kind of uncomfortably recognize how many of those qualities were actually in me which is very very annoying and uncomfortable but not too uncomfortable because there's something unthreatening about seeing a political perspective versus being told or forced to listen to one it's actually you capable of holding conflicting viewpoints joyously when you can see them it's even fun to engage with them because it's visual that's what exciting for me seeing how data can change my perspective and change my mind midstream beautiful lovely data so just to wrap up I want to say that it feels to me that design is about solving problems and providing elegant solutions an information design is about solving information problems and it feels like we have a lot of information problems in our society at the moment from the overload and saturation to the breakdown of trust and reliability and runaway skepticism and lack of transparency or even just interesting this I mean I find information just too interesting it has a magnetic quality that draws me in so if visualizing information can give us a very quick solution to those kinds of problems and even when the information is terrible the visual can be quite beautiful and often we can get clarity or the answer to a simple question very quickly like this one the recent Icelandic volcano which was emitting the most co2 was at the plains or the volcano the grounded planes or the volcano so we can have a look we look at the data and we see yep volcano meter 150,000 tons the grounded plane would emitted 345,000 if they were in the sky so essentially we had our first carbon-neutral volcano and that is beautiful thank you

Channel: TED-Ed

Views: 1,097,018

Keywords: TEDEducation TED-Ed \TED Ed\, \David, McCandless\, design, data, \data, visualization\, Facebook, media, set\

Id: 5Zg-C8AAIGg

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 23 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/lebronjames1212]

I watched this very a class and found it very interesting. Data visualization is so important and will help us move into the future.