The beauty of data visualization - David McCandless

Summary

The speaker addresses the issue of information overload by advocating for the use of visual data representation to discern patterns and connections. They present various data visualizations, such as the billion-dollar-a-gram image, which contextualizes large financial figures, and a landscape of global media panic, revealing hidden patterns. The talk highlights the power of visualizing data to alter perspectives, change behaviors, and even enhance personal understanding of complex subjects like politics and health. The speaker concludes by emphasizing the role of information design in solving societal information problems and the beauty of data when presented visually.

Takeaways

• 📊 Visualizing information is a powerful tool to make sense of large amounts of data, revealing patterns and connections that are not immediately apparent.
• 💰 The 'billion dollar a gram' image illustrates the relative scale of financial figures reported in the news, showing how visualization can provide context and meaning to abstract numbers.
• 🌍 A landscape of global media panic visualizes how fears change over time, with patterns emerging from the data that are not obvious from reading news reports alone.
• 🎮 The regular pattern of concern over violent video games corresponds with the release of new games and significant historical events, showing how visualization can uncover hidden temporal patterns.
• 🌐 The phrase 'data is the new oil' is challenged, with the speaker suggesting 'data is the new soil', a fertile ground for creativity and innovation.
• 🌼 Data visualization is like flowers blooming from a fertile medium, transforming raw data into something beautiful and insightful.
• 📈 The speaker's visual CV demonstrates how personal information can be presented in an engaging and visually interesting way.
• 🧠 Exposure to information design has instilled a kind of 'dormant design literacy' in many people, making us all capable of understanding and appreciating visual information.
• 👀 The human eye is extremely sensitive to patterns and variations, and visual information is processed effortlessly, making it an effective way to communicate complex ideas.
• 🌍 Absolute figures can be misleading; relative figures connected to other data provide a fuller picture and can change perspectives, as demonstrated with military budgets and the number of soldiers.
• 💡 Visualization can compress knowledge, making it easier to understand and interpret large amounts of data, and can even lead to changes in behavior or mindset.

Q & A

What is the main idea presented in the transcript about dealing with information overload?

The main idea is that using our eyes to visualize information can help us see patterns and connections, making it easier to understand and focus on what's important. Visualizing data can also make it more engaging and aesthetically pleasing.

What frustration led the speaker to create the 'billion dollar a gram' image?

The speaker was frustrated with the meaninglessness of reported billion-dollar amounts in the press without context. By creating a visual representation, they aimed to provide a better understanding of these figures.

How does the 'billion dollar a gram' image help in understanding large financial figures?

The image scales boxes according to reported financial figures and uses colors to represent the motivation behind the money, allowing viewers to see patterns and connections between numbers that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports.

What is the significance of the 'landscape of the world's fears' visualization?

The visualization represents the intensity of certain fears over time as reported in the media, showing how public perception of threats like swine flu, bird flu, and asteroid collisions changes and how real events can overshadow other concerns.

How does the speaker use data visualization to find hidden patterns?

The speaker uses data visualization to highlight odd regular patterns, such as the annual peaks in concern over violent video games coinciding with the release of new games and significant events like the Columbine shooting.

What is the metaphor used by the speaker to describe the relationship between data and its potential for insights?

The speaker adapts the metaphor 'data is the new oil' to suggest that 'data is the new soil', a fertile creative medium that can be cultivated to produce new insights and innovations.

How does the speaker's visual CV convey their professional journey?

The speaker's visual CV uses blocks of color and simple design elements to represent their transition from programming to writing and eventually to design, emphasizing their self-taught approach to design.

What does the speaker suggest about the impact of visual information on our perception and understanding?

The speaker suggests that visual information is effortless to process and can provide relief in navigating dense information. It can also change our perspective and views, making complex data more accessible and understandable.

How does the speaker use data visualization to explore the relationship between military budgets and GDP?

The speaker compares absolute military budget figures with GDP to provide a more nuanced view of military spending relative to a country's economic capacity, revealing different insights than looking at raw numbers alone.

What is the purpose of the 'balloon race' visualization of nutritional supplements?

The 'balloon race' visualization aims to show the relationship between the efficacy of various nutritional supplements, based on the amount of evidence, and their popularity, allowing viewers to quickly assess which supplements are worth investigating.

How does the speaker describe the process of creating a visualization of the political spectrum?

The speaker describes it as an attempt to understand how political ideas flow from government to society and back, and how visualization can help one see different perspectives and even recognize conflicting viewpoints within oneself.

What role does the speaker see for information design in addressing societal information problems?

The speaker sees information design as a means to solve information problems such as overload, lack of trust, and skepticism, by providing elegant solutions that can quickly convey clarity and insights.

Outlines

00:00

📊 Visualizing Data to Combat Information Overload

The speaker discusses the concept of information overload and suggests that visualizing data can be an effective solution. By using images to represent data, patterns and connections become more apparent, allowing for better understanding and storytelling. An example is given of a 'billion dollar a gram' image, which provides context to large financial figures reported in the news by scaling boxes and using colors to represent motivations behind the money. The visualization helps in seeing the relationship between different financial figures, such as OPEC's revenue, American charity donations, and war costs. The speaker also introduces the idea of an 'information map' as a tool to navigate through data and presents a landscape of the world's fears based on media reports, highlighting patterns like the regular concern over violent video games that peak annually around the release of new games and significant events like the Columbine shooting.

05:01

🌱 Data as Fertile Ground for Creative Insights

The speaker, a data journalist, challenges the metaphor that 'data is the new oil' by proposing that data is more like fertile soil. This soil has been enriched by the information and data we've cultivated online, and through networks and connectivity, it's ready for creative harvesting. Visualizations and infographics are likened to flowers blooming from this fertile ground. The speaker shares an example of a dataset showing patterns in Facebook status updates related to breakups, revealing interesting insights about human behavior. The speaker also emphasizes the importance of relative figures and connected data to provide a fuller picture, using examples of military budgets and the number of soldiers to demonstrate how perspectives can change when data is viewed in context.

10:01

🌐 The Power of Visual Language in Data Representation

This paragraph delves into the power of combining visual language with the language of the mind, which includes words, numbers, and concepts. The speaker illustrates how this dual approach can enhance understanding and perspective. Examples include a simple question about the largest military budget, which leads to a discussion about the relative size of military spending as a proportion of GDP. The speaker also introduces an interactive visualization tool that allows for dynamic exploration of data, such as filtering nutritional supplements based on evidence and popularity. The paragraph highlights the ability of visualization to compress knowledge, making complex information accessible and interactive.

15:04

🌟 Designing Solutions for Information Problems

The speaker concludes by emphasizing the role of design in solving problems, particularly those related to information. They argue that society faces numerous information challenges, such as overload, lack of trust, and skepticism. The speaker shares a visualization of the political spectrum, which helps to understand different worldviews and perspectives. They also discuss the personal impact of designing such a visualization, which required them to acknowledge their own biases. The paragraph wraps up with a final example of how visualization can quickly provide clarity and answers to questions, such as comparing the CO2 emissions of a volcano to those of grounded planes, demonstrating the beauty and utility of well-designed data visualization.

Keywords

💡Information Overload

Information overload refers to the difficulty in understanding or making decisions when faced with an excessive amount of information. In the video, it is mentioned as a common issue that can be mitigated by using visualization techniques to simplify complex data. The script talks about how visualization can help in seeing patterns and connections, which is crucial in managing information overload.

💡Data Visualization

Data visualization is the graphical representation of information and data. It is a key concept in the video, where the speaker uses various examples to illustrate how visualizing data can reveal patterns and connections that are not apparent in raw data form. For instance, the 'billion dollar a gram' image is a data visualization that contextualizes large financial figures, making them more comprehensible.

💡Patterns

Patterns in this context refer to the regularities or trends that can be identified within data when it is visualized. The video emphasizes the importance of recognizing patterns as a way to make sense of complex information. An example provided is the visualization of global media panic, which shows a pattern of recurring fears over time.

💡Relative Scale

Relative scale is the concept of comparing different quantities or data points in relation to one another. The video uses relative scale in the 'billion dollar a gram' visualization to show the size of various financial figures in comparison to each other, which helps in understanding the true magnitude of each amount.

💡Information Design

Information design is the practice of presenting information in a way that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing. The video discusses how information design can solve problems related to information overload and enhance understanding. The speaker's visual CV is an example of information design applied to personal information.

💡Data Journalism

Data journalism is a form of journalism that involves the analysis of data to produce stories. In the video, the speaker, a data journalist, uses data visualization to uncover hidden patterns and insights, such as the regularity of media coverage on violent video games and their correlation with specific events.

💡Conceptual Visualization

Conceptual visualization involves representing abstract ideas or concepts in a visual format. The video includes examples of conceptual visualizations, such as the political spectrum visualization, which helps to understand and compare different political ideologies and their influence on society.

💡Knowledge Compression

Knowledge compression is the process of condensing large amounts of information into a more digestible form. The video describes the creation of a 'balloon race' visualization that compresses nutritional supplement data, making it easier to understand the relationship between evidence and popularity.

💡Interactive Visualization

Interactive visualization refers to visual representations that allow users to interact with the data, such as filtering or sorting. The video mentions an interactive app that was created from the nutritional supplement data, enabling users to explore different aspects of the data dynamically.

💡Perspective

Perspective in the video refers to the viewpoint or way of thinking about a particular issue or set of data. The speaker discusses how data visualization can change one's perspective by providing a more complete or relative picture, as shown when comparing military budgets as absolute figures versus relative to GDP.

💡Information Literacy

Information literacy is the ability to find, understand, evaluate, and use information. The video suggests that exposure to information design has instilled a form of design literacy in people, enabling them to better interpret and understand visual data.

Highlights

The speaker suggests that visualizing information can help combat information overload by allowing us to see patterns and connections.

A visual representation of billion-dollar amounts in the press was created to provide context and make sense of large figures.

Different colors in the visualization represent different motivations behind the money, such as fighting, giving, and profiteering.

Visualizations can reveal patterns and connections between numbers that would be scattered across multiple news reports.

Examples given include OPEC's revenue, American charity donations, foreign aid, and the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The visualization of global media panic over time shows the intensity of fears as reported in the media.

Hidden patterns, such as the regularity of concern over violent video games, can be discovered through data visualization.

A gap in media-reported fears in September 2001 is attributed to the real fear caused by the 9/11 attacks.

The speaker argues that data is like fertile soil, with visualizations being the flowers that bloom from it.

Data visualization can reveal patterns in social behaviors, such as the timing of breakups based on Facebook status updates.

The speaker's visual CV demonstrates the idea that exposure to media can instill a kind of design literacy.

The human eye is extremely sensitive to patterns and variations, which can be leveraged in visual information.

Combining visual information with concepts can enhance understanding and change perspectives.

Visualizations can provide a fuller picture by connecting absolute figures to relative data, such as military budgets and GDP.

The speaker created an interactive app that visualizes evidence for nutritional supplements, showing the relationship between efficacy and popularity.

Visualization can be applied to ideas and concepts, such as a political spectrum, to understand different worldviews.

Design is presented as a means to solve information problems, with visualization offering clarity and elegant solutions.

A quick example of visualization answering a simple question: comparing CO2 emissions from the Icelandic volcano to grounded planes.

Transcripts

[Music]

[Music]

[Applause]

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 design

in 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 a gram

and this image arose out of frustration

I had with the reporting a 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 uh

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 3 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

and then of course the Iraq War predict

icted to cost just 60 billion back in

2003 and the mushroom slightly

Afghanistan and Iraq mushroom now to

3,000

billion so now it's great now we have

this texture and we can add numbers to

it as well so we can say well 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 that what does that cost the world

let's take a look at that douche which I

think is the appropriate sound effect

from 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 when you're lost in

information an information map is kind

of

useful so I want to show you another

landscape now I need to imagine what a

landscape of the world's fears might

look like let's take a look this is

mountains out of mle Hills a timeline of

global media

Panic 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 in as reported in the media let me

Point them out so this swine flu

pink bird

flu s brownish here remember that one

the millennium

bug terrible disaster uh these little

green Peaks are asteroid

collisions and in summer here killer

[Laughter]

wasps so these are what our fears look

like over time in a media um 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 and

concern about their content but April

isn't a particularly massive month for

um 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 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 stor

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 and data is a 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 and it's not a particular

great metaphor in these times especially

you live around the Gulf of 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 you over the

years online we've laid down um a huge

amount of information and data and we

irrigated 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 it's a really first

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 load 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 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 uh yeah retail therapy

might

help sick cleave yeah you'll definitely

want to take some time off should we

see

so uh information Guru Lee Byron and

myself we scraped 10,000 status Facebook

updates for the phrase break up and

broken up and this was the pattern we

found people clearing out for spring

break uh coming out of 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

unprecedented uh but if you ask the

right kind of question or you work it in

the right kind of way interesting things

can

emerge so um information is 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 um you know started as

a programmer and then I worked as a

writer for many years about 20 years in

print online and in advertising and only

recently have I started designing and uh

I've never been to design school I've

never studied arts or anything I just

kind of learned through doing U and when

I started designing an odd I've

discovered an odd thing about myself I

already knew how to

design but it wasn't like I was imedi

amazingly brilliant at it but more like

I was sensitive to the um 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

um and I don't feel like I'm unique I

feel like 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 visualizers now we're

all demanding a visual aspect to our

information um 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 coming 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 I it led

me to the work of a Danish physicist

called to nor tras 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 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

0.7% that's the amount we're actually

aware of so a lot of your vision is

pouring the bulk of it is Visual and

it's pouring in it's

unconscious and the eye is exquisitly

sensitive to patterns in variations in

color shapee 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 I 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'd like to alter

our perspective or change our views let

me ask you a simple question with a

really simple simp Le 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 UK budget deficit for reference

so that might well chime with your view

that America is um 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

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 that data set is GDP or

what the country is earning 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 America drops into eth

and 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 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

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 um let

the data set change your

mindset and if they 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 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

vitamin C should we Tak in wheat grass

so this is the visualization of all the

evidence for nutritional supplements

this 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 grade

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 are perhaps

not worth

investigating now this image constitutes

a huge amount of work we scraped uh 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'd

only filled two

pages but what it points to is that

visualizing information like this is a

is a form of 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 clean that data and once

it's there you can do cool stuff like

this so I converted this into to an

interactive app so I can now generate

this application online this

visualization online and I can say yeah

brilliant so it's 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 has filled 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 uh just show me herbs and plants and

we go all the natural ingredients now

this app is spawning itself from the dat

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

in a second new evidence comes out I

just changed a row on a spreadsheet

douche again this the image re recreates

itself so it's cool it's it's kind of

living um but it kind of can go beyond

data and it can go beyond numbers and I

like to apply information visualization

to ideas and

Concepts this 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 then back round 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

was helps me anyway to see what others

think and to see where they're coming

from and 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 kind of

journalist 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

kind of comfortably 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'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 sort exciting for 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 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 Runway 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 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 uh which was emitting the most

CO2 was it 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 emitted 150,000 tons the

ground in plain would emitted 345,000 if

they were in the sky so essentially we

had our first carbon neutral

volcano

yeah

and that is beautiful thank

[Applause]

[Music]

you