VISUALIZING INFORMATION AND DATA Visualizing Data: An Interview with Anselm Spoerri VISUALIZING DATA STARTS WITH PUTTING THE DATA INTO A FORM YOU CAN VISUALIZE, THEN UNDERSTANDING WHO YOUR AUDIENCE IS AND WHAT THEY WANT TO KNOW. BY JOCELYN MCNAMARA, MLIS f a picture is worth a thousand and teaches students how best to visu- infographics usually are static. They words, how many data is an alize data. Earlier this year, he was hon- give you a high-level view of the key infographic worth? ored with a Professional and Scholarly salient patterns in the data that have Typically not many, says Excellence (PROSE) Award for DataVis been identified by an analyst, who Anselm Spoerri. An infographic—often Material Properties, a tool he helped then—either by using some tools or I(wrongly) used as a catch-all term for design for McGraw-Hill Education. hiring a graphic designer—comes up everything from simple bar charts to Information Outlook interviewed with a visual representation of those key complex interactive visualizations—is Spoerri about the techniques and tools results. So, from the perspective of data best used to convey a few data points for visualizing data and information and visualization as a whole, infographics that represent key patterns or trends. the biggest challenges facing informa- are what you use when you are com- Visualizations, on the other hand, pro- tion professionals who work with data. municating with a very general audi- vide context for the data and often allow ence or you just want to communicate the audience to manipulate the data The terms graphics, infographics, and highlights in a quick way. to reveal more complex relationships visualization are used frequently and But the moment you want to under- among the factors that affect the data. stand more about the data, then you often interchangeably in regard to data Spoerri, a faculty member at the come into the realm of what’s con- presentation. Can you define these School of Communication and sidered interactive data visualization, words and explain their differences and Information at Rutgers University, has meaning you can actually drill into the similarities? conducted research in the field of infor- data and filter it and look at the subsets mation visualization for the last 20 years The way I like to think about it is, and understand the data yourself. The questions to ask about interactive data visualization are, one, who is doing it, and two, for whom is it being done? JOCELYN MCNAMARA is deputy director at LAC Federal in Rockville, An infographic is designed for end Maryland, and a member of the Information Outlook Advisory Council. She can be reached at [email protected]. users who don’t need to have a lot of content understanding or domain understanding, so they can very quickly grasp key things that are going on with the data. But you can’t communicate INFORMATION OUTLOOK V21 N05 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2017 11 VISUALIZING INFORMATION AND DATA more complex or subtle relationships with data using infographics. If you’re an analyst and you have a data set, you’d like to have interactive data visualization tools so you can bet- ter understand the data you’re trying to analyze. What’s starting to happen— and you’re seeing this in newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post—is that readers are being given access to interactive data visualization tools, so the readers them- selves can explore the data and not just have to take the word of journalists that these are the key insights to be gained from the data. It’s critical that the right kinds of dis- plays are used to make the underlying patterns of the data visible. Often, you need to first figure out what those pat- terns are, so you need to go through an interactive or iterative loop to figure out what’s going on in the data and what’s Anselm Spoerri the best way to see it and understand it and then present it. The distinction, in a major sights. You position your camera one of motivation—how much do I care way, is between the presentation of data and take a snapshot, and you say, here about the data, and how much value and understanding and analyzing data. is an interesting sight. Infographics is is in the data? For example, if you look Sometimes the same tools are being like that—you take a snapshot of an at The New York Times, they did quite used for both purposes. interesting pattern, and then you move a lot of visualizations around the 2016 If you want to go one level deeper, on and explore the data and find anoth- elections. Why? Because they believe you get into what’s called data analytics. er interesting connection or relation- their readers care about that kind of This is where the data sets are so huge ship, and you take another snapshot. data—they want to know more about it, that, yes, you can visualize them, but to And those snapshots are what you put and they may even want to drill into it. be able to really understand them you into your presentation. So it really comes down to the value of need machine learning or artificial intel- Using infographics is really a ques- the data set and what people are hop- ligence methods to find the interesting tion of who your audience is and how ing to do with the information they gain subsets. Then you can use visualiza- much they care to know. Infographics from the data set. tion to further examine these data sets are great for giving you the highlights, What’s also happening with info- or fine-tune the algorithms that are and depending on the sophistication of graphics is what I call “animated pre- crunching through them. the designer, sometimes it can be done sentations.” These are like mini-videos in a very memorable way so that even a that tell you, in an animated way, a So the idea is that you don’t need to be lay person can understand quickly that story. They’re highly scripted, like a a subject matter expert to be able to the data are about cars or animals or movie. And somebody has to figure out drill down and understand what’s going the climate. There are pictorial repre- the highlights to present. on, correct? sentations that immediately tell people It depends. For example, you can the context the data are in. So the interpretation has already been view an infographic as an access ramp The challenge with what I would call done for the viewer? into data to get the key ideas. The “cold” or “sober” data visualization is Yes. And the questions there are, how reader gets an understanding, then that you have a series of displays that skillful is the analyst who interpreted the moves on. He doesn’t linger with the you look at and you don’t even know data, and how skillful is the graphic data, maybe doesn’t even have a desire what they’re about. You have to go look designer who created the presentation? to, because often data is messy. at the axes and read the labels, and it’s Think of it almost like being in a big all very abstract. I can readily imagine that data could be city and wanting to show someone the The other question in my mind is interpreted and communicated one way, 12 INFORMATION OUTLOOK V21 N05 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2017 VISUALIZING INFORMATION AND DATA but someone might view it and draw a sured, or this is what was easy to a very low probability of happening, but different and unintended conclusion. measure, so now we’ll work with it even when it happens, it has a catastrophic though it’s not really the best way to impact. True, there is a possibility that If it’s a rich data set, there are mul- think about this phenomenon. That’s we don’t know yet how to use all of tiple ways you can slice it and filter one issue. Another issue is, how impor- this data and make sense of it. But we it. For example, go back to the 2016 tant is this data? Is it worth it for me to have this computer infrastructure now election. People are still trying to under- develop new ways of measuring things that has gotten so cheap that we can stand what happened, how we got so I can start collecting this data? really go for it. Before, it was way too the result we got, and who voted for And there are always errors in data, expensive to work with these large data whom. The question is, what types of because data is noisy and messy. So sets, so you had to be more “clever” to data variables do you need to take into when I teach students about data visu- extract value. account? Income? Religion? Education? alization, I tell them the hardest part Now, let’s bring it back to infograph- What variables do we have, and how do is getting the data in a form that you ics. I‘m in this sea of data and I’m using we bring them into the data space so can visualize. That’s a lot of work. And visualization to navigate the data and that a viewer can start to see relation- then you have to ask, how valid is your get some sense of it.