Visualization:

Free and open source options for communicating data

What we’re doing today

Data visualization & infographics

Examples of both

8 graphic design basics

Resources

About me

Poppy Riddle

A PhD student positioned between LIS and HCI.

Curious about how we might improve searching for information visually.

Researching how immersive visualization using augmented reality may improve our ability to understand complex relationships in the data.

Art and design education background.

Visualization beyond Excel

What’s wrong with Excel?

Both Excel and Tableau are great for exploration and presentation of data.

Its very recognizable.

Its both the tool and the viewer.

OtherLevels: https://www.youtube.com/@OtherLevels

source: https://www.other-levels.com/blogs/datasets

Visualization’s multiple names

Visualization is the practice of making results from data analysis more easily interpreted by visual or other means.

Overlapping terminology: data visualization, information visualization, scientific visualization, statistical graphics, exploratory data analysis, data art

Graphs, charts, maps, networks

Examples of visualization

Data visualization

Data visualization is the representations of a reduced set of data.

It is an abstraction to help us understand the what the data is about, and how its been reduced.

See Nathan Yao’s Flowing Data catalog of chart types. https://flowingdata.com/chart-types/

Infographics

Infographics are intended to communicate a cohesive narrative that may include tables, graphs, diagrams, maps, etc.

They can be quite artistic to gain your attention.

source: www.hotbutterstudio.com

source: https://www.valentinadefilippo.co.uk/

source: https://wunicholas.wixsite.com/

Graphic Design

Limited attention: you have seconds to get and keep someone’s attention.

Limited memory: working and long-term memory

Limited perceptual channels

Some of the elements of graphic design

Hierarchy

Scale

Color

Line

Shape

Alignment

Space

Contrast

Hierarchy

Read this first.

Read this second.

Read this third.

Scale

Scale affects how big or small your visualization can still be legible.

Color

Color is huge.

Here are some resources:

For scientific publications: http://vrl.cs.brown.edu/color

Super easy and beautiful color palettes: https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel

So many more: https://sites.google.com/view/visres/special-topic-color/noteworthy-and-popular-color-resources?authuser=0

Line

Line weight helps to separate and define.

How does this look big? Or small?

Shape

What do these shapes mean?

How might they be interpreted in the context of the narrative?

See Ferdio’s 100 visualizations with just 6 data points. https://100.datavizproject.com/#

source: https://100.datavizproject.com/#

Alignment

Alignment helps your reader orient themselves and predict where information will be.

The grid has a dedicated following.

The grid on Nicolas Wu’s fish poster.

Just a grid.

Space

This is the resting space around text and visuals. It gives the eye time to rest and move between salient points. (Eye movements are called saccades.)

Also called negative space, or ground.