A visualisation of data visualization choices!

I always love it if people can simplify the complicated decisionmaking processes that we have in our heads, to a simple decision tree. A visualisation of data visualizationn choices!

 

 

My consultancy is one year old so I celebrated by making my first Infographic!

Information IS (could be) beautiful!

Ooh, ooh! This is so beautiful!  Information is beautiful is David McCandless' blog dedicated to beautifully executed infographics.

Here is an example they picked up from the OECD better life Initiative done by Moritz Stefaner and co.

The length of the "flower petals" indicates the rating of the countries on indicators such as Housing, Income, Jobs, Community, Education, Environment, Governance, Health, Insurance, Life Satisfaction, Safety and Work Life Balance. For information about how they measure these, check out the oecd betterlife website

Using Graphs in M&E

(The pic above is from Edward Tufte's website - Ive always been a fan of his work on data visualization too!)

One of my colleagues found a really simple yet detailed explanation about uses of graphs. It is written my Joseph Kelly and it is focused on financial data, but still applicable to evaluators who work with quants.


Using Graphs and Visuals
to Present Financial Information
Joseph T. Kelley

This is from the intro:

We will focus on seven widely-available graphs that are easily produced by most any electronic spreadsheet. They are column graphs, bar graphs, line graphs, area graphs, pie graphs, scatter graphs, and combination graphs. Unfortunately there is no consistency in definitions for basic graphs. One writer’s bar graph is another’s column graph, etc. For clarity we will define each as we introduce them. Traditionally we report data in written form, usually by numbers arranged in tables. A properly prepared graph can report data in a visual form. Seeing a picture of data can help managers deal with the problem of too much data and too little information. Whether the need is to inform or to persuade, graphs are an efficient way to communicate because they can
• illustrate trends not obvious in a table
• make conclusions more striking
• insure maximum impact.

Graphs can be a great help not only in the presentation of information but in the analysis of data as well. This article will focus on their use in presentations to the various audiences with which the finance analyst or manager must communicate.

Enjoy!

Sense Maker

In a previous post, I ventured that we should start questioning the archaic. Our methods and our ways of communicating results haven't changed much over the past 10 years or so, despite new technologies and preferences.

I have posted a number of examples of interesting data visualizations, but the clip below introduces a new way of collecting information, with the help of a product called Sensemaker. 




Here Irene Guijt talks about Sensemaker in the context of Evaluation.



Here is an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review about a real life application done by Global Giving.

Data Visualization: Museum of Me

Presentation of information is important to anyone that wants to make an impact with what they say. Intel dreamed up another interesting way of presenting different kinds of information.

If you have a facebook profile (and you don't mind intel punting their product a bit), why not take a walk in your own museum of you? The "Museum of Me" compiles all your Facebook information and creates a three-minute long expose about you. It could be scary... In the same way as listening to your own recorded voice could be scary. Gizmodo says that this is a reminder why you should'nt be using facebook!

Tools to create infographics.

This post from Fast company provides an overview of some tools for creating info graphics.

They discuss:
Many Eyes
Which allows you to visually represent some data sets that they have available, or allows you to upload your own to play with.

Google Public Data Explorer
Which is a public version of one of Google's research tools.

Hohli
Which helps you to create and customzie Venn Diagrams. Hohli also allows you to create other charts, including scatter plots and other line charts.

Wordle
Although this tool describes itself as a "toy" for generating word clouds, it can be an effective service to spruce up your work.

Visual.ly
Is a new tool (still being tested), that will allow you to create and share infographics. From a first look on YouTube, this new service will be a great resource to create a compelling storytelling visualization. A youtube clip explains it all

Using Dashboards to communicate findings

Shaku Atre says:
"The fundamental premise of business intelligence has traditionally been “to provide the right information to the right people at the right time and at the right cost.” While this statement is irrefutable, it would be more accurate if we changed the word “information” to “actionable information.”

This sounds quite similar to the UFE focus of ensuring that evaluation findings are available to the intended users for the intended use!

In communicating results in a useful manner, this resource http://ow.ly/4xlQn from Information Management shares some interesting ideas about Dashboards.

Communicating Data

This week, I sat in a two day information quality conference. One of the key points was that data is not necessarily being used to improve service delivery, because (very simplistically)

* data quality is problematic, and
* we don't have people who can tell the story of the data so that others can relate to it.

I've already decided that my new thing for this year will be to think about communicating data. So Im seraching for good examples of visualization methods.

A friend sent this interesting example along:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/mar/22/middle-east-protest-interactive-timeline

And another friend alerted me to this website:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

Questioning the archaic...

We had a debate in our office the other day as to the proper use of spacing after a fullstop. Some of my colleagues insisted that double spacing after a fullstop was the proper way to type whilst others insisted on single spacing. A couple of opinion polls later, I started checking some style manuals and the opinion of the typographers. The jury is not out on this anymore - If you type on a modern computer, single space is what you should use.

Apparently people who type two spaces, were taught by people who were taught by people who learned to type on typewriters that only allowed monospacing - i.e. an "l" and an "m", despite being different in size, was given the same amount of space, because typewriters couldn't work differently. This resulted in lots of white space in the middle of words, hence the need for double spacing between senences. With the introduction of computers, almost all texts are now created in proportional fonts - so the narrower characters take less space, and you don't need a double space after a full stop.

But this got me thinking - How much of what we do as evaluators and researchers do we do just because we were taught by people who had to make use of old archaic technology to get the job done? I mean, think about it - Why do we still insist that the primary output from an evaluation should be a report? Or... hold on to your seat... a PowerPoint presentation?

If use of evaluations (or information) depends on the degree to which the findings are communicated concisely, then we should be building our communications capability and get creative. If you look at the capabilities that simple Mac Software like Keynote offers (and I'm no expert) then really! There is so much more that we should be doing

I share with you three examples of what I would like to see more of:

Hans Roslin inspires with visualization of statistics (This guy rocks!):
http://ow.ly/47WDV


This "Story of Stuff" clip combines presentation, story telling and animation in really interesting ways
http://ow.ly/47WIh


And Here is how a normal presentation with some voice can help to get the message across, a lot better than just a PowerPoint presentation
http://ow.ly/47WOA

Visualization Methods - Really really interesting

Previously I wrote about Edward Tufte's Book on presenting graphs. Well, it seems that data visualization has been taken to a whole new level.

Ralph Lengler & Martin J. Eppler form the Institute of Corporate Communication compiled a "Periodic table" of visualization methods that categorizes and shows examples of about 100 visualization methods.

The table can be downloaded in pdf format at:
http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table_as_pdf.pdf

But try the online version - As you mouse over the various "elements" an example pops up to demonstrate what it looks like.
http://ow.ly/v9RI

The full article explaining the table can be found at
http://ow.ly/wk7d

Wow - It takes people specializing in visualization methods to think of such an innovative way to present their concept.

PS. I heard about this on the American Evaluation Assocation's Linked in Group.This and other useful information gets shared from time to time.

Graphical Presentations

I previously commented on Tufte's book about using graphical presentations properly. Here are some examples that you would not find in his book.