Mapping & Data Visualization Slideshow Notes

Slide 1: Title Introduction to Data Visualization and Mapping - why such a big explosion in the past years? How can we determine “good” images? How can we wade through so much data and condense it? Image: interior of a mouse’s ear. Pseudocolored, direct volume rendering of the inner portions of a mouse cochlea in which all of the cells have been removed by a detergent. Extracellular matrix, including blood vessel basement membranes, can be seen via specific fluorescent antibody labeling and imaging by scanning thin sheet laser imaging microscopy. Purpose: to understand the molecular mechanisms of hearing. Studying mice sheds light on genetic and physiological basis for human hearing impairment.

Slide 2: Definition Mark Lombardi is a visual artist who maps the relationships between people and studies the connections and degrees of closeness. For example, he explores subjects such as the Vatican Bank, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the Iraq war - in short, he studies the “uses and abuses of power.” He traces the path of money and business to track a web of interconnected sources. In the process, he creates abstract drawings that stand alone in their own right as artistic explorations. He calls these drawings “Narrative Structures.” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1487185

Slide 3: Information Mapping History Charles Minard is considered the “father of information graphics” because he invented the bar graph, the pie chart, and the line graph. The chart above tells the story of a war: Napoleon’s ​ ​ Russian campaign of 1812. It was drawn half a century afterwards by Charles Joseph Minard, a ​ French civil engineer who worked on dams, canals and bridges. He was 80 years old and long retired when, in 1861, he called on the innovative techniques he had invented for the purpose of displaying flows of people, in order to tell the tragic tale in a single image. Edward Tufte, whose book, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” is a bible to statisticians, calls it “the best statistical graphic ever drawn”. [SOURCE] ​

Minard’s chart shows six types of information: geography, time, temperature, the course and ​ ​ direction of the army’s movement, and the number of troops remaining. The widths of the gold (outward) and black (returning) paths represent the size of the force, one millimetre to 10,000 men. Geographical features and major battles are marked and named, and plummeting temperatures on the return journey are shown along the bottom.

The chart tells the dreadful story with painful clarity: in 1812, the Grand Army set out from Poland with a force of 422,000; only 100,000 reached Moscow; and only 10,000 returned. The detail and understatement with which such horrifying loss is represented combine to bring a lump to the throat. As men tried, and mostly failed, to cross the Bérézina river under heavy attack, the width of the black line halves: another 20,000 or so gone. The French now use the expression “C’est la Bérézina” to describe a total disaster.

In 1871, the year after Minard died, his obituarist cited particularly his graphical innovations: “For the dry and complicated columns of statistical data, of which the analysis and the discussion always require a great sustained mental effort, he had substituted images mathematically proportioned, that the first glance takes in and knows without fatigue, and which manifest immediately the natural consequences or the comparisons unforeseen.” The chart shown here is singled out for special mention: it “inspires bitter reflections on the cost to humanity of the madnesses of conquerors and the merciless thirst of military glory”.

What does the map show us

● Forces visual comparisons (the upper lighter band showing the large army going to Moscow vs. the narrow dark band showing the small army returning). ● Shows causality (the temperature chart at the bottom). ● Captures multivariate complexity (size of army, location, direction, temperature, and time). ● Integrates text and graphic into a coherent whole. ● Illustrate high quality content (complete and accurate data, presented to support Minard’s argument against war). ● Place comparisons adjacent to each other, not sequentially (people forget if they have to go from page to page ). ● Use the smallest effective differences (i.e., avoid bold colors, heavy lines, distracting labels and scales). https://datavizblog.com/2013/05/26/dataviz-history-charles-minards-flow-map-of-napoleons-russia n-campaign-of-1812-part-5/

Other influential works by Charles Minard: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1c/Minard-carte-viande-1858.png/250p x-Minard-carte-viande-1858.png Pie chart of cows raised in France for consumption in Paris. Master of condensing information.

John Snow: John Snow (15 March 1813 – 16 June 1858) was an English physician and a leader in the adoption ​ of anaesthesia and medical hygiene. He is considered one of the fathers of modern epidemiology, ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ in part because of his work in tracing the source of a cholera outbreak in Soho, London, in 1854. ​ ​ His findings inspired fundamental changes in the water and waste systems of London, which led ​ ​ to similar changes in other cities, and a significant improvement in general public health around ​ ​ the world. (Wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Snow ​

Mapping can bring change, especially in public health. For example, the importance of handwashing can quickly be seen with a visual representation of the spread of germs.

Slide 4: Mapping Transportation The London transportation system (bussing and underground) was becoming a complex and growing web. Engineer Harry / Henry (called both) Beck decided the map needed an overhaul and created the first “identity system” for transportation, since copied by almost all urban transport systems. See other examples: Massimo Vignelli in NYC, Paris, Washington DC.

What’s the system? Abandon actual distance in favor of abstracted proximity. Color coding still exists, but exchanges are more clear. What’s the goal? Clear communication and smooth traffic flow.

Sidenote: Edward Johnston created a typeface that was used in the updated logo. Very influential in the modern era, for clarity and fresh appeal: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35916807 ​

The London Transport system inspired Harry Beck and many other artists. An exhibition called Mind the Map: Inspiring London Art, Design, and Cartography explores the relationship between transportation, design, art, and mapping. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2012/may/24/mind-the-map-in-pictures

Slide 5: World Geographic Atlas We quickly 1. Understand relationships, 2. Identify patterns, 3. Predict trends, and 4. See the quick communication - a great example of data visualization.

Herbert Bayer was a graphic designer and type designer at the Bauhaus, in Germany. WWII ​ forced him to leave, and he emigrated to the US. Walter Paepcke, the CEO of the Container Corporation of America, was a super-funder of graphic design, and he commissioned Bayer to produce a massive atlas that mapped as much information as possible in one physical book. It was never commercially sold, only given to libraries and universities. It was printed on high-quality paper and produced originally as guache paintings (short story: very high quality production).

Pre-internet, it’s amazing what Bayer packed into one page, and how ahead of its time it was. This specific spread

A classic example of twentieth century Modernist book design, the "World Geographic Atlas" was published by the Container Corporation of America in 1953 to commemorate their twenty-fifth anniversary. It was never made commercially available. Its graphs, charts and maps designed by CCA art director Herbert Bayer and his associates are still visually arresting over fifty years later.

Slide 6: Edward Tufte Edward Rolf Tufte (born March 14, 1942) is an American statistician and professor emeritus of ​ ​ [2]​ ​ ​ political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University. ​ He is noted for his writings ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ on information design and as a pioneer in the field of data visualization.[3] ​ ​ ​ ​ ​

Pioneer in terms of sense of scale in data visualization. If you are thinking in terms of a website, large scale would be big data content, medium scale = web pages, small scale = menus within a page.

Tufte encourages the use of data-rich illustrations that presented all available data. When such ​ ​ illustrations are examined closely, every data point has a value, but when they are looked at more ​ ​ generally, only trends and patterns can be observed. Tufte suggests these macro/micro readings be presented in the space of an eye-span, in the high resolution format of the printed page, and at the unhurried pace of the viewer's leisure. Source: www.edwardtufte.com ​ ​ ​

Slide 7: Conceptual Mapping Form always is driven by content. What concepts / ideas / information needs to be communicated? Which form best communicates that?

University of Michigan physics professor Mark Newman makes cartograms that resize the states ​ ​ ​ ​ based on their population.

The states are colored red or blue to indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the ​ ​ Republican candidate, Donald Trump, or the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, respectively. There is significantly more red on this map than there is blue, but that is in some ways misleading: the election was much closer than you might think from the balance of colors, and in fact Clinton won slightly more votes than Trump overall. The explanation for this apparent ​ ​ paradox, as pointed out by many people, is that the map fails to take account of the population distribution. It fails to allow for the fact that the population of the red states is on average significantly lower than that of the blue ones. The blue may be small in area, but they represent a large number of voters, which is what matters in an election. We can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states are ​ ​ rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with size proportional not to their acreage but to the number of their inhabitants, states with more people appearing larger than states with fewer, regardless of their actual area on the ground. On such a map, for example, the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island.

As you can see, the states have been stretched and squashed, some of them substantially, to give them the appropriate sizes, though it's done in such a way as to preserve the general appearance of the map, so far as that's possible. On this map the total areas of red and blue are more similar, although there is still more red than blue overall.

One way to reveal more nuance in the vote is to use not just two colors, red and blue, but to use red, blue, and shades of purple in between to indicate percentages of votes. That’s what this map represents. As this map makes clear, large portions of the country are quite evenly divided, appearing in various shades of purple, although a number of strongly Democratic or Republican areas are visible too.

Fernanda Viegas Fernanda B. Viégas is a computational designer whose work focuses on the social, collaborative, and artistic aspects of information visualization. She is a is a co-leader, with Martin Wattenberg, of Google's "Big Picture" data visualization group in Cambridge, MA. Before joining Google, she and Wattenberg founded Flowing Media, Inc., a visualization studio focused on media and consumer-oriented projects. Prior to Flowing Media, they led IBM's Visual Communication Lab, where they created the ground-breaking public visualization platform Many ​ Eyes, an experiment in open, public data visualization and analysis. ​ Before joining IBM, Viégas's research at the MIT Media Lab focused on the visualization of online communities. She is known for her pioneering work on depicting chat histories, email archives, and Wikipedia activity. Viégas's interest in the stories that people tell about these archives led to a series of visualizations of personal, emotionally-charged data. Her artistic visualizations have been exhibited in venues such as the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Viégas holds a Ph.D. and M.S. from the Media Lab at MIT.

Her wind map charts the wind in real time - animated. ​ http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/08/charting-wind “Although we made the wind map as an artistic exploration, we've been surprised by the kinds of things people use it for: bird watchers have tracked migration patterns; bicyclists have planned their trips; and we've even seen conspiracy theorists use it to track mysterious chemicals in the air. Even on a day of mild weather, patterns can be dramatic. There's much more to the wind than a west to east flow.”

She has also worked on projects such as The Art of Reproduction: they are never perfect, but how much do reproductions lie? http://hint.fm/reproduction/ ​

How do these conceptual maps help us visualize bias or complexity or underlying themes we previously understood as “givens,’ such as the notion of a static, red or blue state that depicts everyone in it as having the same opinion?

Slide 8: Abstract Mapping Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series is named after the neighborhood in Santa Monica, California where he had his studio. The subjects of the series are 1) an abstract consideration of color and form, 2) a treatment of the southern California landscape (the mellow subtleties of West Coast sunlight, the vast almost abstract appearance of the dry, open land), and 3) the painting process itself, which the artist makes visible to the viewer through the layers of paint. - UMMA ​ website Many Voices

Barnaby Stepney, a graphic design student at the University of Brighton in the UK, mapped the levels of noise within a 1200 ft radius of the letterpress workshop at the University of Brighton. He mapped the results on a 36 point grid structure, which is the typical grid for creating letterforms. It becomes an abstract work itself, similar to Josef Albers’ squares. We see correlations between volume, tone, grid position, and geographic location.

How are these related? Mapping concepts in an abstract form. Still preserving relationships but introducing geometric abstraction.

Slide 9: Subjective Mapping Paula Scher is a graphic designer, a female partner at Pentagram (a big global firm), and very successful. Her style is somewhat big, bold, and whimsical and often hand-drawn. The dots remind people of Australian aboriginal art and has been labeled “primitive.” She overtly states that “All Maps Lie” (the title of her exhibition) and challenges the scientific nature of data visualization.

“In her paintings, Scher renders information and data culled from headlines, maps and diagrams in madcap fields of hand-drawn typography. Obsessive, opinionated and more than a little personal, the maps provide an exuberant portrait of contemporary information in all its complexity and subjectivity. Scher's new book of her paintings, MAPS, was published last fall and ​ ​ ​ recently went into its second printing.”

They are the most authoritative of the genus information graphicus. They are to be trusted. They ​ ​ must be trusted. Yet the foreword to a new book published this week, Paula Scher MAPS: ​ Paintings, Installations, Drawings and Prints, is titled "All Maps Lie." And this coming from Scher ​ herself, a map maven whose hand-painted extravaganzas are, it seems, celebrations of map veracity. "My father invented a device called 'stereo templates' for the government which corrects ​ the lens distortion in aerial photography. There would be no Google Maps today without that advancement," Scher proudly told me. Indeed, it was Marvin B. Scher who taught his impressionable daughter that all maps are distorted, not literal truth; that information changes based on the point of view of the mapmaker. "My painted maps are opinionated, biased, erroneous, and, also, sort of right," Scher admits.

"I have been obsessed with charts, graphs, diagrams, and maps for thirty years and have used them as a form of satire and social comment in my design work," Scher says. "The Data-Vis movement is different. Initially, charts, graphs, diagrams, and maps existed in support of an article to emphasize a point, so the authorship was clear. In the current Data-Vis craze, information exists as an end in and of itself. It's not ironic or satirical. It is supposed to look scientific, as if a computer mechanically selected the data. The last line of an article I wrote about Faux Info says, 'the information does your thinking for you and you don't have to think at all.' I may be a precursor of that, but I hope not." - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/10/paula-scher-makes-enormous-maps-t hat-are-only-sort-of-right/246880/

Slide 10: Erasure Julie Mehretu is an Ethiopian/American who merges many identities. Her work maps places, but keeps them somewhat anonymous by abstracting the buildings. Then she erases parts to create areas of contrast. But erasure also highlights issues of inequality and difference.

Interview with PBS Art 21: How much does the viewer need to know? How much of the underpinnings do you wish to reveal?

Mehretu: There are different types of information that go into the picture, depending on the ​ ​ painting, and especially in the work now. In certain paintings that information is very readable and it’s just pure geometry—geometric shapes that mimic architecture. So you look at the structure and you can’t really define anything, but you know that it’s really just created out of geometric shapes. Then there’s other work in which I incorporate a lot of specific architectural plans. As the works progress, the more the information is layered in a way that’s hard to decipher what is what. And that’s intentional. It’s almost like a screening out, creating a kind of skin or layer of just this information that we recognize. So if a building is from Baghdad or New York or Cairo is not so important. I don’t necessarily reveal which building is from which place. It’s more that this information is part of the DNA (that’s how I keep thinking about it) of the painting—part of the ancestral makeup of what it is and the information that informs your understanding or your vision of it https://art21.org/artist/julie-mehretu/ ​

Slide 11: Visualization Software Students can explore these different apps and software programs and discuss advantages / disadvantages based on the task.

Discuss the explosion and need for so many programs. Does that help or confuse the user?

How can we point people in the right direction so they are not overwhelmed by the amount of data they find? Ex. Data Driven Detroit - “we do data so you can make a difference” - they will pull the related maps for you and not confuse you with non-related material.

Slide 12: Activity