The beauty of data visualization | David McCandless

Summary

The speaker explores the power of visualizing data to combat information overload. Using examples like the Billion Dollar o-Gram and visual timelines of global fears, he illustrates how presenting information visually can reveal hidden patterns, enhance understanding, and offer new perspectives. He emphasizes that data visualization merges the eye's love for patterns with the mind's conceptual thinking, making information more accessible and engaging. The talk highlights how visualizing complex datasets allows us to grasp intricate concepts quickly, turning data into a 'living' entity that continuously adapts and informs our understanding.

Takeaways

• 👀 Visualizing information helps us see patterns and connections that would be difficult to grasp from raw data.
• 💸 The Billion Dollar o-Gram illustrates the importance of context when discussing large sums of money.
• 📊 Visualizing data allows us to compare information easily, such as seeing how OPEC's revenue dwarfs their climate change fund.
• 🌍 Relative data provides a fuller picture; for instance, U.S. military spending is large in absolute terms but drops in ranking when compared to GDP.
• 🌐 Data visualization turns complex data into intuitive maps that can change perspectives, such as the visualization of global fears or military budgets.
• 🎮 Hidden patterns in data, like the regular spikes in media concern about violent video games, are revealed only through visualization.
• 🌱 Data is compared to soil, a fertile medium for creative insights when combined with visualization.
• 🎁 Data can be fun and insightful, like uncovering patterns in Facebook status updates about breakups during certain times of the year.
• 💊 Visualizations can simplify complex health data, like determining which supplements are supported by the most evidence.
• 💡 Combining visual and conceptual languages enhances understanding, allowing us to navigate dense information quickly and change our perspectives.

Q & A

What is the main problem the speaker identifies in the way billion-dollar amounts are reported in the media?

The speaker identifies that billion-dollar amounts reported in the media are meaningless without context. It's hard to understand the significance of these figures, and they only make sense when visualized and compared relative to other figures.

How does visualizing data help in understanding large numbers, according to the speaker?

Visualizing data allows people to see patterns and relationships between numbers that would otherwise be scattered across reports. It makes the data more tangible and helps individuals grasp the context and significance of the information.

What is the significance of the 'Mountains Out of Molehills' visualization?

The 'Mountains Out of Molehills' visualization shows a timeline of global media panic, illustrating how media reports heighten fears over time for various topics like swine flu, bird flu, and asteroid collisions. It highlights how certain fears rise and fall, and even shows the regular pattern in media concerns about violent video games.

What unusual pattern did the speaker discover in the data regarding violent video games, and what caused it?

The speaker discovered a twin peak pattern in media reports about violent video games, with peaks in November and April. The November peak aligns with the release of Christmas video games, and the April peak coincides with the anniversary of the Columbine shooting, which the media revisits each year.

How does the speaker redefine the metaphor 'Data is the new oil'?

The speaker redefines 'Data is the new oil' by suggesting that data is actually more like soil. He describes it as a fertile, creative medium that, when worked with and visualized, can bloom into beautiful insights and patterns, much like flowers blooming from soil.

What is the purpose of the visualization showing the military budgets of different countries?

The purpose of this visualization is to provide context to the size of the U.S. military budget by comparing it both in absolute terms and as a proportion of GDP. It challenges the perception that the U.S. is disproportionately militarized by showing that, relative to its economy, other countries have larger military expenditures.

What does the balloon race visualization about nutritional supplements show?

The balloon race visualization shows the evidence supporting various nutritional supplements in relation to their popularity. The higher a supplement is on the chart, the more evidence there is for its effectiveness, allowing users to quickly assess whether a supplement is worth investigating.

What does the Facebook breakup visualization demonstrate?

The Facebook breakup visualization demonstrates patterns in relationship breakups based on status updates. It shows that breakups spike around Spring Break, Mondays, and just before Christmas, while the lowest point for breakups is Christmas Day.

How does the speaker explain the bandwidth of different senses?

The speaker explains that our sense of sight has the highest bandwidth, comparable to a computer network, while touch is similar to the speed of a USB key, and hearing and smell match a hard disk’s speed. Taste, the slowest, is compared to a pocket calculator.

How does the speaker describe the importance of combining visual and conceptual information?

The speaker explains that combining visual information (patterns, colors) with conceptual information (words, numbers) creates a powerful tool for understanding complex data. This dual approach helps change perspectives, making it easier to comprehend large or abstract concepts in a more intuitive way.

Outlines

00:00

👀 Visualizing Data for Clarity and Insight

This paragraph introduces the idea of information overload and presents data visualization as a solution. By using visual tools, we can see patterns and connections more clearly. The speaker presents the 'Billion Dollar o-Gram,' which visually compares billion-dollar figures across various contexts, revealing unexpected insights. For example, OPEC's annual revenue is contrasted with its small climate change fund. The visual format helps contextualize and make sense of complex data, such as the Iraq War cost, African debt, and the global financial crisis.

05:00

🌱 Data is the New Soil: A Medium for Innovation

The speaker expands on the idea of data as a fertile medium, not just raw material like 'new oil.' With today's connectivity and the vast amount of data available online, visualizations become the 'flowers' that bloom from this 'soil.' Through examples like a Facebook status update analysis on breakups, patterns in data that are otherwise invisible emerge. These patterns, like breakups peaking at certain times of the year, demonstrate how working with data in creative ways can lead to interesting revelations.

10:01

🧠 Dual Language of the Eye and Mind

This paragraph explores the power of combining visual and conceptual information to create a more nuanced understanding. The speaker discusses how raw numbers, such as military budgets or army sizes, can lead to biased perceptions. By contextualizing data (e.g., military budgets as a percentage of GDP or army sizes relative to population), the visualizations change perspectives. These insights emphasize the importance of relative figures over absolute ones, as they offer a fuller picture and encourage a mindset shift.

15:02

💡 Visualizing Ideas and Changing Perspectives

In this section, the speaker discusses how visualizations not only help in interpreting data but also in understanding complex ideas and worldviews. By creating a balanced political spectrum diagram, the speaker highlights how visual information can allow us to engage with and understand differing perspectives. Visualizing political ideologies, for example, made the speaker recognize qualities in opposing views that resonated within himself. This process leads to a deeper, more reflective engagement with complex topics.

🌍 Solving Information Problems Through Design

This final paragraph emphasizes the importance of design in solving modern information problems, such as overload, distrust, and lack of transparency. Visualizations offer quick clarity, even for complex or negative data. An example of this is the comparison between the CO2 emissions of grounded planes and an Icelandic volcano. The speaker ends on a note about how even dire information can be beautiful when visualized effectively, offering clarity and actionable insights through visual design.

Keywords

💡Information overload

Information overload refers to the overwhelming amount of data and information that people are exposed to, which can be difficult to process effectively. In the video, the speaker mentions how modern society suffers from information overload or 'data glut,' and suggests that visualizing information can help us manage this issue by making patterns and connections easier to see and understand.

💡Data visualization

Data visualization is the process of representing data graphically to reveal patterns, trends, and connections that might not be apparent in raw data. The speaker emphasizes that by visualizing data, we can turn complex information into something that is easier to comprehend. He provides several examples, like the 'Billion Dollar o-Gram,' where visualizing billion-dollar amounts gives context and clarity to otherwise abstract figures.

💡Context

Context in the video refers to the background information or circumstances that make data meaningful. The speaker highlights that large numbers, like billions of dollars, are often reported without context, making them difficult to understand. Visualization provides this missing context by scaling and comparing figures visually, so we can grasp their significance relative to one another.

💡Patterns and connections

Patterns and connections are recurring relationships or trends within data that become more apparent through visualization. The speaker illustrates this with examples, such as the financial data in the 'Billion Dollar o-Gram' and the media’s coverage of fears like swine flu, which when visualized, reveal deeper insights about how data interacts and evolves over time.

💡Information map

An information map is a visual representation that helps navigate complex data, similar to how a map guides someone through physical space. In the video, the speaker describes data visualizations as a form of 'information map,' useful for exploring and making sense of large quantities of information, helping users find clarity in the 'information jungle.'

💡Data as the new soil

This metaphor compares data to soil, implying that data is a fertile medium from which new ideas, insights, and innovations can grow. The speaker contrasts this with the common metaphor of data as 'the new oil,' arguing that data is more creative and generative, especially when used in visualizations that allow new patterns to emerge and 'bloom' like flowers.

💡Bandwidth of the senses

The 'bandwidth of the senses' refers to the amount of information our senses can process, measured in terms of data capacity. The speaker explains that our sense of sight has the highest bandwidth, likening it to the speed of a computer network, making visual information particularly effective and immediate in delivering large amounts of data efficiently.

💡Knowledge compression

Knowledge compression is the process of condensing large amounts of information into smaller, more digestible forms, without losing essential meaning. The speaker mentions how data visualizations can compress vast amounts of knowledge, like the chart of nutritional supplements, into a single, easy-to-read visual that still contains complex data.

💡Relative vs absolute figures

Relative figures are data points compared to other variables (like GDP or population), while absolute figures stand alone. The speaker uses military spending as an example, showing that while the U.S. has the largest absolute military budget, when considered as a proportion of GDP, other countries rank higher, demonstrating the importance of context in data interpretation.

💡Let the dataset change your mindset

This phrase, borrowed from Hans Rosling, encapsulates the idea that data can shift perspectives if presented in the right way. The speaker argues that visualizing data not only makes it easier to understand but can also challenge and change our preconceived notions, as seen when comparing military budgets or health supplements through visualizations.

Highlights

Visualizing information can help solve information overload by making data easier to understand and revealing patterns.

The 'Billion Dollar o-Gram' visualizes billion-dollar amounts in a way that makes them relatable and meaningful through size scaling and color coding.

By visualizing global fears over time, distinct patterns emerge, like a recurring peak in concern over violent video games every November and April.

The Columbine shooting in April 1999 created a lasting media-driven peak of concern for violent video games that persists annually.

Events like 9/11 create gaps in media-driven fears, shifting the global focus to real dangers over transient concerns.

Data visualization can shift perspectives, such as showing that the U.S. military budget, though massive in absolute terms, ranks only 8th in proportion to GDP.

Visualizing soldiers per capita reveals that China, despite having a large army, ranks 124th in soldiers relative to its population.

'Data is the new soil' suggests that information is a fertile medium from which innovative ideas and visualizations can bloom.

Visualizations are a form of knowledge compression, packing large amounts of data into easily comprehensible visual formats.

Data visualization allows people to see relationships between efficacy and popularity in nutritional supplements, like in the 'balloon race' graphic.

Interactive visualizations that update in real-time, like the supplement efficacy app, can dynamically respond to new data.

Visualizing political spectrums can help people understand opposing viewpoints without bias, forcing acknowledgment of qualities across the spectrum.

Beautiful data can provide clarity to information problems in society, from overload to skepticism, by offering intuitive visual solutions.

The Icelandic volcano CO2 comparison shows how visual data can provide clear answers to complex environmental questions.

The human eye is naturally sensitive to patterns and color variations, making visual information an effortless and engaging way to process data.

Transcripts

It feels like we're 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 that we can see

the patterns and connections that matter

and then 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, visualized information can just look really cool.

So, let's see.

This is the $Billion Dollar o-Gram,

and this image arose

out of frustration I had

with the reporting of billion-dollar amounts in the press.

That is, they're meaningless without context:

500 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 scraped a load of reported 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 a different relationship to 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.

Let me point out some that I really like.

This is OPEC's 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 300 billion a year, donated to charity every year,

compared with the amount of foreign aid

given by the top 17 industrialized nations

at 120 billion.

Then of course,

the Iraq War, predicted to cost just 60 billion

back in 2003.

And it mushroomed slightly. Afghanistan and Iraq mushroomed now

to 3,000 billion.

So now it's great

because now we have this texture, and we can add numbers to it as well.

So we could say, well, a new figure comes out ... let's 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?

What has that cost the world? Let's take a look at that.

Dooosh -- Which I think is the appropriate sound effect

for that much money:

11,900 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.

And 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 Molehills,

a timeline of global media panic.

(Laughter)

So, I'll label this for you in a second.

But the height here, I want to point out,

is the intensity of certain fears

as reported in the media.

Let me point them out.

So this, swine flu -- pink.

Bird flu.

SARS -- brownish here. Remember that one?

The millennium bug,

terrible disaster.

These little green peaks

are asteroid collisions.

(Laughter)

And in summer, here, killer wasps.

(Laughter)

So these are what our fears look like

over time in our media.

But what I love -- and I'm a journalist --

and what I love is finding hidden patterns; I love being a data detective.

And there's a very interesting and odd pattern hidden in this data

that you can only see when you visualize it.

Let me highlight it for you.

See this line, this is a landscape for violent video games.

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 video games come out,

and there may well be an upsurge in the concern about their content.

But April isn't a particularly massive month

for video games.

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 copy-cat 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."

Data is the kind of ubiquitous resource

that we can shape to provide new innovations and new insights,

and it's all around us, and it can be mined very easily.

It's not a particularly great metaphor in these times,

especially if you live around the Gulf of Mexico,

but I would, perhaps, adapt this metaphor slightly,

and I would say that data is the new soil.

Because for me, it feels like a fertile, creative medium.

Over the years, online,

we've laid down

a huge amount of information and data,

and we irrigate it with networks and connectivity,

and it's been worked and tilled by unpaid workers and governments.

And, all right, I'm 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 lot of numbers and disconnected facts.

But if you start working with it and playing with it in a certain way,

interesting things can appear 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.

(Audience: Chocolate.) David McCandless: Chocolate.

You might want to get some chocolate in.

Any other guesses?

(Audience: Shopping.) DM: Shopping.

Yeah, retail therapy might help.

(Audience: Sick leave.)

DM: Sick leave. Yeah, you'll definitely want to take some time off.

Shall we see?

(Laughter)

(Applause)

So, the information guru Lee Byron and myself,

we scraped 10,000 status Facebook updates

for the phrase "break-up" and "broken-up"

and this is the pattern we found --

people clearing out for Spring Break,

(Laughter)

coming out of very bad weekends on a 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,

unprecedented.

But if you ask the right kind of question,

or you work it in the right kind of way,

interesting things can emerge.

So information is beautiful. Data is beautiful.

I wonder if I could make my life beautiful.

And here's my visual C.V.

I'm not quite sure I've succeeded.

Pretty blocky, the colors aren't that great.

But I wanted to convey something to you.

I started as a programmer,

and then I worked as a writer for many years, about 20 years,

in print, online and then in advertising,

and only recently have I started designing.

And I've never been to design school.

I've never studied art or anything.

I just kind of learned through doing.

And when I started designing,

I discovered an odd thing about myself.

I already knew how to design,

but it wasn't like I was amazingly brilliant at it,

but more like I was sensitive

to 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 everyday, all of us now

are being blasted by information design.

It's being poured into our eyes through the Web,

and we're all visualizers now;

we're all demanding a visual aspect

to our information.

There's something almost quite magical about visual information.

It's effortless, it literally pours in.

And if you're navigating a dense information jungle,

coming across a beautiful graphic

or a lovely data visualization,

it's a relief, it's like coming across a clearing in the jungle.

I was curious about this, so it led me

to the work of a Danish physicist

called Tor Norretranders,

and he converted the bandwidth of the senses into computer terms.

So here we go. This is your senses,

pouring into your senses every second.

Your sense of sight is the fastest.

It has the same bandwidth as a computer network.

Then you have touch, which is about the speed of a USB key.

And then you have hearing and smell,

which has the throughput of a hard disk.

And then you have poor old taste,

which is like barely the throughput of a pocket calculator.

And that little square in the corner, a naught .7 percent,

that's the amount we're actually aware of.

So a lot of your vision --

the bulk of it is visual, and it's pouring in.

It's unconscious.

The eye is exquisitely sensitive

to patterns in variations in color, shape and pattern.

It loves them, and it calls them beautiful.

It's the language of the eye.

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.

Let me ask you a simple question

with a really simple answer:

Who has the biggest military budget?

It's got to 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 U.K. budget deficit for reference.

So that might well chime

with your view that America

is a sort of warmongering military machine,

out to overpower the world

with its huge industrial-military complex.

But is it true that America has the biggest military budget?

Because America is an 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,

and that data set is GDP, or the country's earnings.

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 that you, perhaps, weren't considering,

and American drops into eighth.

Now you can also do this with soldiers.

Who has the most soldiers? It's got to be China.

Of course, 2.1 million.

Again, chiming with your view

that China has a militarized 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 124th.

It actually has a tiny army

when you take other data into consideration.

So, absolute figures, like the military budget,

in a connected world,

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 dataset change your mindset."

And if it can do that, maybe it can also change your behavior.

Take a look at this one.

I'm a bit of a health nut.

I love 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 vitamin C? Should I be taking wheatgrass?

This is a visualization of all the evidence

for nutritional supplements.

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 immediately apprehend

the relationship between efficacy and popularity,

but you can also, if you grade the evidence,

do a "worth it" line.

So supplements above this line are worth investigating,

but only for the conditions listed below,

and then the supplements below the line

are 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 and graded them all.

And it was incredibly frustrating for me

because I had a book of 250 visualizations to do for my book,

and I spent a month doing this,

and I only filled two pages.

But what it points to

is that visualizing information like this

is 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 data, and once you've cleaned that data,

and once it's there,

you can do cool stuff like this.

So I converted this into an interactive app,

so I can now generate this application online --

this is the visualization online --

and I can say, "Yeah, brilliant."

So it spawns itself.

And then I can say, "Well, just show me the stuff

that affects heart health."

So let's filter that out.

So heart is 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 --

just show me herbs and plants. I've got 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, the image recreates itself.

So it's cool.

It's kind of living.

But it 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, into their beliefs

and back around again in a cycle.

What I love about this image

is it's made up of concepts,

it explores our worldviews

and it helps us -- it helps me anyway --

to see what others think,

to see where they're coming from.

And it feels just incredibly cool to do that.

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 a journalist, a Left-leaning person --

but I couldn't, because I would have created

a lopsided, biased diagram.

So, in order to really create a full image,

I had to honor the perspectives on the right-hand side

and at the same time, uncomfortably recognize

how many of those qualities were actually in me,

which was very, very annoying and uncomfortable.

(Laughter)

But not too uncomfortable,

because there's something unthreatening

about seeing a political perspective,

versus being told or forced to listen to one.

You're capable of holding conflicting viewpoints

joyously when you can see them.

It's even fun to engage with them

because it's visual.

So that's what's exciting to me,

seeing how data can change my perspective

and change my mind midstream --

beautiful, lovely data.

So, just to wrap up,

I wanted to say

that it feels to me that design is about solving problems

and providing elegant solutions,

and information design is about

solving information problems.

It feels like we have a lot of information problems

in our society at the moment,

from the overload and the saturation

to the breakdown of trust and reliability

and runaway skepticism and lack of transparency,

or even just interestingness.

I mean, I find information just too interesting.

It has a magnetic quality that draws me in.

So, visualizing information

can give us a very quick solution to those kinds of problems.

Even when the information is terrible,

the visual can be quite beautiful.

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 it the planes or the volcano,

the grounded planes or the volcano?

So we can have a look.

We look at the data and we see:

Yep, the volcano emitted 150,000 tons;

the grounded planes would have emitted

345,000 if they were in the sky.

So essentially, we had our first carbon-neutral volcano.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

And that is beautiful. Thank you.

(Applause)