Henry Woodbury explains, in Data in the Round, what’s problematic with the following illustration of United States energy imports:
Data in the Round on the InformationDesign Watch, a blog by the team at Dynamic Diagrams,
Henry Woodbury explains, in Data in the Round, what’s problematic with the following illustration of United States energy imports:
Data in the Round on the InformationDesign Watch, a blog by the team at Dynamic Diagrams,
We’re going to take liberties here and tell you that the following graphic could easily have turned into a very problematic assignment. However many ways there might have been to do it right, we suspect that there were many more ways it could have gone wrong. Here’s the graphic, by Matt Daigle – you can also see his cartoon work here.
Here’s the graphic – explanation after the jump.
Of course – if I’m right about this, the answer will come as no surprise.
Pictures of Numbers is one of the websites run by Mike Dickison, an accomplished polymath who’s done some excellent work in information design with scientific and other information. A typical post compares two ways of looking at religious attitudes in a set of countries; his point (if I understand correctly) is that one often has options of putting much richer data into a single information graphic. His solution – entirely workable – would never have occurred to me.
[Readers will notice an uptick in information graphics posts as we are trying to prepare a number of visual aids – initially a set which tries to explain our purpose here atPopular Logistics: to examine the intersection between the sets of policy problems generally named “disaster preparedness,” “public health,” “environmental policy,” “energy policy,” “transportation policy,” “urban planning,” and “terrorism.” They’ve all got common threads – and to a surprising extent, common solutions – and that’s what we’re here to explain. But we’d like to present a richer version of these arguments – with few words and many more graphics. Hence our return to the precincts of Edward Tufte – and his books, and other information designers. So – we apologize to any readers who regard these posts as “off-topic,” but promise that, in time, we’ll make clear these connections].
The post which nearly knocked me out of my chair was Graphical Octants – how to, readably, add a third axis to a standard X/Y axis – I’ve been wrestling with how to show three variables – for instance – for disaster preparedness interventions, wanting to demonstrate:
Dickison has an elegant graphic solution to this problem in Graphical Octants . We hope to update this post with illustrations after speaking with Mr. Dickison.