I’m at a sxsw panel on infographics! Here are the speakers:
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Ben Fry
Processing.org
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Casey Caplowe
Good
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Eric Rodenbeck
Stamen Design
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Shan Carter
The New York Times
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Infographics are something that GOOD started to do early on. They created a section called transparency for graphical explorations of data. They are always working with different people and design firms. They’ve done infographics on Coke, Paris Hilton, Walmart, the largest bankruptcies in history, race of supreme court nominees, Iraq war, Darfur. They had a fight in the office over whether the Darfur graphic was too glib about genocide. They like to crack open things that people hear a lot about but don’t necessarily understand.
Infographics are a way of taking a large set of data and seeing what’s in there. If you look at a map of all the roads in the US, the cities and mountains emerge just from the data. The data tells the story, and it’s the job of the designer to get out of the way. You can trick people into thinking about correlations and statistics without making them deal with correlations and statistics. Processing.org gets people up and running quickly with creating infographics. They are hoping to get the designer out of the middle so that programmers can come up with beautiful graphics on their own. They hope to get it running on android.
The New York Times graphic department is about 30 people. They are responsible for all the charts, datamaps, and visualizations online and in the newspaper. About a third of those people do mainly online work. They are trying to do live visualizations, which is harder because you don’t know the story the data is going to tell. You can set up the graphic so the interesting data is in the middle of the page. Just because you’re talking about states doesn’t mean you have to use a map, particularly if only a few states are really unpredictable or interesting.
Graphics can capture moments in time. The OJ trial verdict could be seen in stock markets and phone call lengths. Turning common twitter words into graphics that resize based on their relevance can be very powerful. Consumers are used to zooming in and out, so you can put in a lot of data and let people go as granular as they want to. Infographics don’t have to be for public consumption, they can also tell organizations a lot about their internal information. Visualizations don’t have to just be on one page. They should have APIs and RSS feeds so that people can reclaim the data and use it for their own projects. Visualizations can be used for exploration, not just search.
Question Time!
What new technologies or processes are coming?
We are trying to come up with non-flash solutions to animating, mapping and zooming. We are trying to get off of the screen and into the real world, augmented reality on mobile phones, etc. Literacy is rising over interactive infographics, and we expect to see brands entirely built around this concept.
Does HTML 5 solve some flash problems, or is it just as limited as Flash?
There are limitations to both, but at least you can run HTML 5 on an iPhone. In terms of getting everyone access, being able to get everything in the browser and out of proprietary plug-ins would be great.
What are the resources out there to find good data and APIs?
It depends on your problem. Any time you’re getting started, you shouldn’t start with data, because it will look like data. Start with a problem or a question, and work back to the data. Many cities are getting better about releasing data sets, as is the census. Data.gov is also an excellent resource. Webscraping is always an option as well. Also, we sometimes just call companies and ask for the data we’re looking for. Sometimes they come through. You’d be surprised. They have excel files sitting around, and they’re happy to get the notoriety. It helps if you say you’re from the New York Times.
How do you balance data richness with design and beauty?
Charting is a language, and all the ways of communication are valid. Think about your audience. Are you writing a haiku or a technical manual? It’s a medium more than a toolset. There’s going to be a Beyonce of data visualization. It’s like musical genres or fashion. It’s going to get even more diverse as more people come to visualization, and each person brings their own style.
Are any of you working with augmented reality?
Microsoft is building geolocating maps with timestamps so you can go back in time on any given street corner.
