Visualizing through graphics

The Flash component allows you to search by art medium accepted, or by neighborhood.  The neighborhoods are determined by groups of zip codes, and the ten art medium categories are made of various combinations of the more than 60 categories itemized in the Chicago Artists’ Coalition’s list of galleries.  One important thing I’ve learned about data reporting is that you have to use journalistic discretion to pare down the options.  60-something categories of media can be extremely overwhelming.  If you fail to use discretion when creating a project, you’ve failed the user.  I used Tuftian principles for the graph itself, keeping it as simple as possible.  I liked using the idea of duplicates to make up the units of a bar graph.  I went with houses to symbolize the gallery buildings.  My first instinct was to use paintbrushes, or paint palletes.  But that doesn’t work when you are sorting for the decline of these galleries that sold wearable art. The Monopoly-style house was the best generic choice.  I went with the blue accent color since it was calm and unobtrusive, but more visually interesting than a solid black and white graph.  I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the power of an accent color, and sticking mostly with the neutral to pack a punch.  Other tweaks I made as I went along included adjusting the size of the ticks on the y axis.  I found myself thinking more about interface design than usual, when you have a certain filter on, the background color on that button should be different to indicate what variables you are looking at.

And I learned something about myself.  When I set out, this type of piece is what I saw as the definition of a visualization.  Now, I see data-driven applications, especially those allowing for you to dig deep using the power of frameworks, as a form of visualization. One isn’t necessarily better than the other, in fact, I think they play off of each other.  But I’m not a visual person.  It’s fun to play with, but I know designers who could have packed more of a visual punch with this piece.  But by keeping it simple, I’m hoping it works.

Searchable databases are visualizations, too

You can read most of my thoughts on how this came out here, and I’ve made a few small tweaks since then.  Most notable is dealing with the list of media accepted on the detail page.  I was trying to form a sentence with the media that were accepted, but was having trouble figuring out how to display “and” before the second-to-last template tag that was actually displayed.  I solved the problem by turning the accepted media list into a list of bullet points.  I think it reads better this way, too.  I like the idea of being able to get an overview of sorting the data through the Flash visualization, and then digging as deep as you want with the searchable database.

Not providing current gallery information

Going back to the Flash visualization, throughout the quarter, my independent study adviser Rich Gordon and I debated the merit of putting the number of current galleries into the visualization.  I eventually opted not to.  That’s because this whole project is about persistence of art galleries — what happened to the 96 that existed in 1990?  Introducing the number of current galleries is a completely different data set.  I tried making it another node on the graph, but it made everything else seem tiny.  Even listing the number of current galleries just seemed out of place.  I believe the lesson here is to stick to your data set.  Comparing the galleries that persisted to total number of galleries is a valid project, but a different project — that was my ultimate conclusion.

Flash as a viz tool

Some other challenges I encountered included proper alignment of the various house icons (thanks to Flash’s grid feature for help on that).  Knowing when to use the right tool was an interesting battle.  At first, I was trying to get Flash to create the detailed views that Django is ultimately better suited for.  By combining Flash and Django, I think I came up with a significantly better combination.  Even if someone doesn’t explicitly go into design, I would heartily recommend they read Tufte and try experiments in Processing, Flash and Django.  It’ll all help in the long run.

Looking toward the future

There was a time, not that many months ago, when I prided myself on the fact that I knew enough about programming to communicate with coders.  Now, I just do the programming myself — or at least, as much as I can.  I’ve determined that visual design isn’t my forte, but I understand enough about it that I’ll be able to integrate smoothly with an art director or Web designer.  I even understand enough about Flash that I’ll be able to collaborate closely with front-end interactive designers.  But I wouldn’t know any of this if I hadn’t tried a lot of new things. I’ve applied my journalistic curiosity, that I typically use for subject matter, to new ways to tell stories, and tools with which I can bring those stories to life.  It is for that adventure that I embarked on this journey.  As I said after my Washington quarter, I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve also learned just how little I know. It will be an ongoing quest. But how fun and educational it’s been to ramp up my skills in these past ten weeks.

The power of community

As I’ve been pursuing the independent study, one of my other goals has been to blog regularly.  By that, I mean more often than once a month, which has been my typical pattern.  And through the excitement I’ve gotten from my exploration of programming journalism and visualizations, I’ve been able to do that.  I’ve promised myself it won’t end at this point, there’s so much more to explore.

But if you’re reading this, I want to thank you. Your comments on the site, via email, or on Twitter have enhanced my learning process.  You may not be receiving tuition money, but whether you helped me troubleshoot my Django app, discussed the intracies of Flash, pointed me to a great GitHub tutorial or just chatted with me about where I might fit in the grand scheme of things, I couldn’t have done it without you.  The greatest asset of the CAR community, as I see it, is the community itself.  I look forward to keeping in touch for years to come.

It’s for that reason that I couldn’t be more excited about NICAR later this week.  (Less than 72 hours till I leave!)  I can’t wait to meet you all in person, to hear even more inspiring ideas that I can bring to my first “real job” (not sure where that is yet, but I’ll keep you posted).  Heck, I’m even giving a five-minute lightning talk on some cool tricks I’ve been playing with in Javascript.  It’s a beautiful thing when an almost-graduated student’s knowledge is valued that much.  But from what I’ve seen, I shouldn’t be surprised.  It’s not about a judgment of age or experience, it’s about sharing something with each other.  That’s what makes NICAR, this quarter and journalism in general so special.  As it says on my high school class ring, knowledge is power.  I’m ecstatic that we all will continue that journey together for years to come.

Gallery owners: Flexibility necessary for survival

Chicago’s local art gallery community is a tight-knit group.  Ask them about the industry’s history. They’ll tell you this city was once seen as a mecca for new, up-and-coming art galleries – but that was in the mid- and late-1980s.  And things have changed since then.

There was a time when dealers at these personalized institutions sold everything from paintings to kaleidoscopes to cards – all to a stream of clients with a variety of interests from across the globe. The pieces they sold gave customers a respite from the large-scale department stores that had emerged in earlier decades, where so many items were mass-produced.  Art collectors knew they could get something special at one of the at least 96 galleries that existed in Chicago as of 1990.

In fact, the Chicago Artists’ Coalition put together a list of these galleries that were within the city limits, as well as others in the suburbs and further downstate. It served as a resource for their members to learn where they could sell their work.

Fast-forward to 2010, and some gallery owners will tell you the heyday of the 1980s has vanished, and Chicago isn’t able to support galleries the way it once did.   Others don’t bemoan the health of the gallery industry.  They say it’s manageable, if you’re smart about your expectations for your business.

Deven Golden, director of the Compassrose Gallery in 1990, said, “We used to say we were an international gallery that just called Chicago home, but that dried up at the end of the ‘80s.”

Golden, who managed the River North gallery that closed in 1992 after founder Jim Rose’s death, has since moved to New York to pursue his career as a gallery owner.

The persistence of these galleries, their ability to survive, is one way to measure the health of the visual art industry in Chicago.

The Medill News Service followed up with representatives from the 96 galleries listed in the city as of 1990, to find out their fate.  Analysis of a database created from this information revealed that six other gallery owners had similar thoughts to Golden, and they have moved their galleries out of state since 1990.  And 34 of the 96 galleries have relocated within Illinois, often remaining in Chicago.

49 galleries from the original list are now closed.  That’s just over half of the total.

To survive the change in the economic climate in the past 20 years, some gallery owners say they have expanded their inventory into other areas. While they still consider their businesses galleries, they have other interests.

Karen McCauley is the manager of Gallery Genesis, located on the South Side.  It’s one of seven galleries to stay in its same location since 1990.  McCauley credits the business’ success to a shift in focus.  “We’re more of a church goods and religious supply store now, than anything else.  But we are still a gallery.  We keep artwork on display upstairs, and we do sell it.”

She said the gallery was successful with its original focus on religious art until the early 2000s, and then it just wasn’t bringing in enough money in its current form.

“We’re in a niche that’s very small and specialized, it’s definitely hard,” McCauley said.

Gallery 1633, located on the Northwest side, is one of the nine galleries from the 1990 list that has closed in the past five years.  It closed in 2007 when co-founder, and then-owner, Montana Morrison decided to move it to Red Bluff, Calif.  Bill Dixon, husband of the late Morrison who died in late 2009, said that the gallery was affected not just by the artistic market in the area, but by the neighborhood as a whole.

“It just wasn’t like it used to be, wasn’t the same experience to live or work there,“ said Dixon.  “It was overcrowded, generally.  It wasn’t a comfortable place to shop, or to live.”

Others thought the prevailing issue was the lack of visibility for the gallery community in Chicago by the public at large.  And that’s a problem for a business in an industry where so much relies on word of mouth.

River North’s Center for Contemporary Art closed in 1996.  According to Cheryl Pelavin, who worked at the gallery in the 1990’s, the reason was clear: “Lack of prestige,” she said simply.

For many gallery owners, these issues meant that their love of art dealing often took them away from the city they called home, as they found the market increasingly difficult throughout the 1990’s and 2000’s.

Golden of the Compassrose Gallery now owns his own gallery, Deven Golden Fine Arts, in New York.

“In the ‘90s, we sold 60 percent of our art to people outside of Chicago, “ he said of his work at Compassrose.  “I don’t think we were alone.”

Golden said that for many international clients, it was often easier to get to New York from Europe.  The Big Apple also created a certain experience for these collectors, which Chicago simply didn’t have, he said.

“Collectors like to go to New York,” said Golden.  “When people were starting their collections, they’d go to Chicago, and it’d be fine.  But when people started to buy enough, suddenly it would matter and click, and they ‘d move on.”

At the end of the 1980’s , the gallery scene was on its way up,  Golden said.  At that time, he thought it might meet the success and prevalence that theater now enjoys in Chicago.  But that would have required more substantial backing from the city.  “We never got to the critical mass that we needed.  It just didn’t happen,” he said.  “The city had a lot of trouble forming its own identity as an art community.”

And Golden said he wishes that weren’t true.  “I could’ve stayed in Chicago.  But I liked the gallery thing. I thought to myself, ‘I want to have my own, and in Chicago, it’s just very difficult to do.’”

The declining climate for galleries isn’t specific to Chicago, though. Golden owned a gallery on Manhattan’s 57^th Street for five years, and in the early 2000’s, he lost his backer, and had to close that gallery.

He’s now opened a new one, but he sees it as more of a side business that supplements his work at Artsystems, where he designs software for art dealers.

Yet others have made it work in Chicago. One such gallery owner is Cheryl Pertl, whose A.E.S Gallery has persisted in Chicago since 1990.   The business has moved three times, but has always stayed within the city limits.  “We go where the customers are,” she said.  She added the key is being flexible as the market shifts.  While she previously focused on mediums, such as painting and sculpture, now she carries works across media but only covering one topic: McDonalds. She said that attracts a specialized, and dependable, client base.

Pertl now also owns the Ogilvie-Pertl Gallery, which opened in 2000 in the River East Art Center.  As opposed to the modern incarnation of A.E.S., it has a broader specialization.  Her tip for success is to recognize that treating a gallery as a sole source of income may not be feasible.  “I make my own art, too.  If you think you can just exist on the money you make from a gallery in Chicago, well, it’s not that you can’t, it’s just extremely difficult.”

I’ve been working on my independent study, exploring data looking at the persistence of arts galleries in Chicago.  There’s a lot of interesting patterns that I’m both reporting for my arts class, and visualizing for the project. But what I think what would be a really helpful part of the presentation is to let people look at the parts they care about.  My independent study advisor Rich Gordon and I discussed not using Processing to make the visualization — which was our original plan — but focusing on the best tool for the job.  I’m moving the graphical part of it back into Flash.  That wasn’t enough, though. I wanted to open it up as a searchable database that will accompany this story, and the finished piece is helping me perform analysis, too. 

This quickly morphed from a quick supplement to a wrap-your-head-around-it-now-this-is-serious Django App #2!  Check it out here, download original data here, go to GitHub for code here.

Forms didn’t seem too complicated, but it was much tougher going than I imagined.  I had the most trouble wrapping my head around how to use code to approach multiple values returned by the user, you can select as many different categories of gallery as you want, and the form will return the results. Before I learned that you could search IN a list, the code was merely picking up the last value selected.  And then, what’s the point of a multiple? There were also issues with the Apache settings and using POST.

What’s funny about coding is that I’ve spent hours hashing this out, and I don’t really remember many of the specific problems at the moment.  I remember their solutions, but not what went wrong.  I just see it all as part of the process.

As an added feature, I thought maps would help people place where these different galleries were, not necessarily as an aggregate, but as you’re reading about a gallery in the detail view, it would be nice to contextualize it visually.  But this didn’t call for a scrolling interactive, Javascript-heavy piece, just the Google Static Maps API.  I’m pleased I was able to get the geocoding done through a Python script, and then use Django template tags to insert lats and longs.  It’s just the beginning of working with geographic data, but was especially meaningful because after I finished my script and ran it, I came across a sample geocoding Python script in my email that Derek Willis had sent me back in the fall.  That was the night I finally “got” what Python and Ruby were capable of.  And I was able to reproduce it on my own!

It’s that exhilarating feeling that makes all of this worthwhile, in a selfish sense.  Sure, I do it because I believe this is a valuable type of journalism, and I think it has great meaning and potential for the general population.  And in this day and age, I think it’s essential that we make the most of data, and use the technology that’s available to us — there’s so much potential!  But, in a more visceral sense, I still get a kick out of seeing something filter just right, map out just how it’s supposed to.  There’s really something special about a piece that allows people to fulfill their own curiosities in a way that matters to them, in a way that simply isn’t bound by a linear storytelling format.

I’ve been thinking about my coding experience as being a lot like stumbling around in the dark.  First, I just stood still, heightened my senses and observed my surroundings to get a sense of the environment.  Then, I started slowly feeling my way along the wall, trying simple things.  Found others who could help, became confident enough to step away from the safety of the wall, knowing that as I tripped and fell, others could help me get back up.  (On this particular project, many thanks to Ken Schwencke, Andy Boyle, Brian Boyer, Chris Amico’s blog posts, and of course, the ever-patient and responsive Derek Willis who started me on my quest.  No bias, just who happened to be online at the right time.)  I metaphorically fell way too many times.

I’ve found deployment to be the worst part, by far, and it gets a little better each time I do it.  Being that I hadn’t really heard of Apache before a week ago, well, let’s hope it improves. On the same vein, I spent two hours trying to install SQLite, adjust the PYTHONPATH etc., since I got an error that my SQLite database was unreadable.  Turns out, I still had the local path set in settings.py.  And I made the same correction last week, just forgot.  I’m coming to think that the answer is almost always the missing parentheses or slash, or something miniscule.  Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation is often the best one.

Now, I find myself running a little too fast sometimes, forgetting that I can’t really see where I’m going. Running into a wall at full speed hurts.  But it’s so much better than standing still!  And I know how to get up myself, and where I can go for a helping hand.

Back to the app, the design could use improvement, and so could the logic of some of the detail pages. In fact, a lot of that is taken from the last app.  One thing I really want to work on is fixing the output of a list of categories associated with the gallery, it yields a list separated by commas.  But there’s no “and” before the last item.  I hope to fix it soon, although whether I can puzzle that out before the end of the quarter is iffy.

There’s always something new to try, and I know I’ll tweak this further.  I suppose it’s sort of an example of agile development in a way (a technique described in practice at Medill here by the Chicago Tribune’s Brian Boyer.)  But I do think I have a much better handle on forms now, which I know has to be quite important in the CAR/Web-dev world.

If you have any feedback about the database, or happen to find any data points that stick out to you personally, I’m always interested in chatting.

Recently, California Watch ran a package on the profitability of DUI checkpoints that did an exceptional job of making the most of the Web and allowing for multiple levels of exploration by incorporating a graphic, map, video and text.  Multimedia Producer Lisa Pickoff-White took the time to chat with me and answer some of my questions about her work, the organization and share her thoughts about the industry of journalistic data visualizations.

This profile of Pickoff-White is a part of my continuing series I’m calling “Data Delvers,” where I pass on summaries, quotes and audio clips from conversations with journalists using technology to find, analyze and convey data-driven stories and/or projects to the modern audience.

California Watch’s workflow

Pickoff-White said the various stories are assigned, and it’s up to them to decide what the best fit for the story is.  She said she knew she wanted to do a map, because she wanted to demostrate trends of where certain checkpoints were clustering in certain regions of California.  She felt that the readers could at least get that out of it if they only looked at it for ten seconds.  But if they wanted to delve deeper, they could get more information about any checkpoint by clicking on it. But then there were just two levels, very broad, and very detailed. She wanted to pull focus to the cities with the five highest impound rates, and also visually demonstrate just how many cars were being impounded.  That’s where the interactive graphic comes in as a sort of middle ground.

The advantages and concerns of non-profit status

Sustainability is a constant concern for the not-for-profit organizations, that Pickoff-White said she thinks about often. She said it’s important that users spend time with her work, and are able to understand the story.  As part of this goal, she said one of the best classes she took at Berkeley was one in interface design.

But one of her favorite parts of working at California Watch is the collaboration.  “Everyone’s so engaged and really excited to be here,” she said.  “You know we all want to be working on every story.”

She collaborates closely with fellow multimedia producer, Mark Luckie, who also edits the journalism and technology blog 10,000 Words.  Pickoff-White also collaborates often with Agustin Armendariz, the computer-assisted reporting specialist at California Watch.

Transitioning to multimedia work

For several years, Pickoff-White worked as a reporter, seeing herself as a data geek who did stories based on politics, budgets, science and technology among other topics.  But she went to graduate journalism school at Berkeley to pursue multimedia, coming to California Watch soon after graduation.

“I’ve always been someone who thinks very visually,” she said, “and I wanted to bring that to my journalism.”

Experiments can be risky

She said she feels lucky that she can experiment at California Watch, but at the same time, she feels very responsible for the traffic numbers the work receives.  It’s important to her that people are looking at and engaging with her interactives.

She cited an example from Berkeley where she was part of a team that made a piece exploring donors to Obama’s presidential campaign with many different features and lots of ways people could explore information.  It was posted on the hyperlocal sites Mission L@cal and Oakland North, but didn’t get much traffic.  In contrast, she later worked on a piece that featured a game with some short videos, and required the user to do only one or two things.  She said it did a lot better.

“I think the key lesson is simplicity,” said Pickoff-White.

Social networking analysis is a topic that my independent study advisor Rich Gordon and I have been discussing often during our weekly meetings and through materials he’s pointed me to, as well as my own reading and observation, I think it has some great potential in terms of journalistic applications.  Whether it’s about getting a job or pushing your political agenda, so much in this world is about who you know.

That’s why I was so excited that this week’s programming exercise in Ben Fry’s Visualizing Data book, which I’m using to learn Processing, focused on visualizing networks.  The chapter focused on showing these connections between adjacent words in the text, and proving how it was not an effective visualization technique.  I couldn’t agree more – this was the wrong application for it.

The book mapped the words in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, but because I don’t like replicating exact projects when I can avoid it, I decided to hop over to Project Gutenberg and find something more interesting.  Upon searching for journalism, because why not, I found a book on “Journalism and Women,” written by a man.  This piece is worth a post of its own, in trying to supposedly help women.  Parts are condescending, and some advice is more relevant today than ever, but for both genders.  Today’s subject isn’t the book’s content as a whole, but the connections between words to see if that helped to illuminate certain points.  Hint: It didn’t, because this was a failed experiment.

But I learned the skills of how to use a network map to visualize connections, which could be valuable in the future.  It’s really difficult to make sense of thousands, and even hundreds of nodes.  I think this type of visualization demands a strong interactive component so the user can make sense of what’s happening, and a filtering mechanism would be even better.

As I was writing this, Rich sent me a link to a Slate visualization of how news stories connect to each other — “News Dots”. Great content, and the interface works, using different colors for different categories, having many different levels of filtering and exploration.  You can even go back and look at other days.  The more you roll over, the more you click, the more you want to explore, but I can understand what’s important at a glance.  I just got sidetracked for 20 minutes in deep exploration. Which is the mark of good work, in my eyes.

Back to my visualization.  Here’s the final product, which I coded to be output as a PDF, it looks like a jumbled mess.  The bigger the bubble, the more time the word appears.  And there’s still so many common words with no meaning that the visualization is started to represent how many times “than” was used, utterly unhelpful.  (There’s 126 pages worth of connections by the way, when you force the program to output them, and that’s eliminating duplicate nodes.)  A user can’t get much out of this, no longer how long he or she stares at it, other than the fact that there are a lot of complicated connections.

The book then instructed us to try to make more sense of the information by bringing it into the open source Graphviz program. It looks at and sorts the nodes hierarchically.  The program froze on my 126 pages of connections.  When I limited it to 10 pages, the first two chapters of my book, it produced this rather complicated gif file — which has a significantly long load time.

It makes a little more sense, but frankly not much, but at least you can see the individual nodes. And if you zoom in, you can scroll around, which is an interesting way to provide interactivity within a very large static graphic.  But this is nowhere near ready for professional publication.

This section has taught me a lot about the importance of optimizing complicated visualizations, probably by coding it so only some parts load at once.

The chapter also took a look at using networking the right way by looking at a Web server and instead of individual nodes letting the data create a shape. The shape depicts a network, but without the same amount of detail. It works because it doesn’t overwhelm the reader.  But being as I have no Web server log of my own – I have to dig into the innards of my GoDaddy site, or I might be able to do it with my Django server once I get a project up and running in the coming week or so – I opted to treat it as an interesting reading exercise, but not one to put into practice, for now anyway.

It’s something I’ve been wrestling with all quarter. It’s the reason I have such a problem with uncontextualized data centers as the primary data initiative in news organizations.  Which is why I found myself saying, “Yes, yes, yes!” to “Visual Confections,” the final chapter I read this week in Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations.

I love the word confection, and the images it draws to mind.  One definition is of a food rich in sugar.  It’s sweet, pleasurable to the senses.  I always think of confections as more carefully crafted sweets, something I would get in the family-owned fudge shop by my middle school as opposed to a Hershey bar I might see in the checkout line.  And our journalistic creations should be confections in this sense, they must delight as well as inform.  But a second definition of confection, according to Princeton’s WordNet, is concotion, “the act of creating something by compounding or mixing a variety of components.”

And that’s where it gets interesting.   Journalists have the capability to aggregate, analyze and redisplay information.  Even if it already exists on the Web, and the user can access it, we provide the context.  This speaks to me as various professors and editors have referred to some of my more adventurous news projects as “Web concoctions.”

It’s the only chapter in the book where I can recall an example from journalism being used.  The idea of visual confections is that while many visualizations are just representing a data set, you can use a visualization to tell a story, combining different sources and using bits of text — or “chatter” to inform the viewer.

Graphs may approach this when placed next to a story, or if ample text is included with the graph, or if further explanation appears on rollover or click.  And perhaps in exceptional circumstances, not one word of text will be needed, but I think that’s extremely difficult.  It should be reasonably quick for viewers to understand the point of the image or interactive experience, and in most cases, some words will be needed to help facilitate that.

I admired the example the book pulled that accompanied a June 1985 article in the Washington Post, warning viewers about the dangers of the fast-moving Potomac river.  What could have been presented as a boring list of safety tips becomes almost cartoonish in its illustration.  It doesn’t seem silly, but rather, makes the illustration more personable.  The various illustrations within the larger piece range from showing the structure of the waterways, to how you should arrange your body to try to survive the current.  Little blocks of illustration and chatter use Tufte’s principle of several small multiples being more clear than an illustration trying to do everything at once.

Treating a visualization as a confection and creative opportunity does more for grabbing a viewer’s attention, as well.  And it demands more creativity from the creator, which makes it more fun to design, I think.  That enjoyment is passed on to the user, the information sticks in the user’s head.  With that principle in mind, I can now see that a Django-based application, or any data-driven app, is a data visualization by some other name.

Visualizations are much more than how to make that Excel graph easier to understand and less boring — they tell a story that grabs the reader and helps him or her comprehend a diverse set of information.  It’s an attitude that we can bring to journalism of all sorts to take the profession away from stenography and into analysis.

Journalists are a lot like college professors, we must spend the time doing research to discover new things.  But we must also make sure we can convey that diverse set of information to people of all skills and interest levels, just as professors must communicate with everyone from freshmen in their intro class with vague interests to advanced graduate students working on a dissertation who demand very specific information.

We see it used often in graphics, by juxtaposing the same object against other versions of the same object, we’re better able to compare and focus on the distinctions. If we’re trying to make a point with a graphic or an article, repetition helps to make sure it’s something the user is thinking about.

It’s a strategy used in this graph featured in Junk Charts, looking at the participation of people on Twitter in terms of percent. By keeping the unit used in a visualization consistent, you are keeping that variable constant.  But make that icon interesting enough, and people will care a little bit more than just looking at the height of a bar graph. Tufte says don’t frame the different instances, but let the objects speak for themselves.  Keep it simple.

It’s all about simplicity, and the balance between aesthetically pleasing the user and ensuring an accurate display of information.  And if only one is possible, the latter must take priority.

I’m definitely considering using this as a strategy in the visualization I’m doing for my final project.  It’s still in the beginning stages, since I’ve been creating my own database from scratch.

And on a side note, I just took this career test where you pick colors and it tells you what you are best suited for.  It says I am an “organizer” and I am best suited — wait for it — to work with “data systems.”  Weird.

This example project is a static map of Gov. Quinn’s State of the State address. The bigger the square containing the word, the more times it appeared. I told the program not to include “the,” “an,” “a”, or “of”, because then it’s just a map of large squares of articles. But the more articles you tell it to delete, the more you find more of them. Note to self: Make a list of all articles to exclude from this sort of thing in the future.

I thought it was interesting how few times the word “state” actually came up in the speech. It’s important to remember that even when we see words contained within small boxes, they are still fairly significant. The insignificantly small words are those contained in boxes that are too small to contain letters.

It would be an even better project if you could click on the small boxes to zoom in, in the style of that fabulous NY Times budget interactive from a little while back.

I also made a dynamic treemap that details the structure of a folder on your file system. The dynamic project is of course more interesting, but the way it works, it depends on being loaded on your computer, so I’m holding off from posting it online.

It’s an interesting take on the concept of the scatterplot, even before using its interactive features, it asserts its usefulness as a population density map. Each dot represents a different zip code, and the more zip codes an area requires, the greater its population. This visualization isn’t news per se, but could be a valuable reporting tool, helping journalists to understand how visualizations are geographically related, and helping them find the precise location of where a certain source is located.

I take no creative credit for the project that emerged below. But I did learn a few things about the Processing language and coding that I thought might be useful to note. Probably more useful as a note to self than anything else, but here goes.

1. If you’re unable to find a class, you may think it’s because you are missing a bracket within that class. But you could be missing a bracket in another class, which could affect other code. It took me much longer than it should have to figure that out.
2. You can clean a spreadsheet or database efficiently by using a program to adjust small nuances. But sometimes the time it takes to code is longer than it would take for you to do it in a non-programatic way. If the question is making it easier for the computer to parse, then you should let a program make that change. If it’s a question of making it easier on your eyes, there may be times when that isn’t as necessary. Or maybe that’s just me.
3. Little nuances can take a lot longer than you think. I kept fussing with the placement of textual instructions, wondering if it was clear enough where to click and when. Sometimes simple is better, I think just having the word “Zoom” for people to click on is clearer than a three-level sliding scale in this case.
4. Embedding Processing applets in WordPress is buggier than it should be. I’m unhappy that the visualization displays as a big gray box. But I couldn’t see a way to put text on that gray box saying “Click in this box to begin,” because that blank box doesn’t appear when I run the visualization directly on my computer, it just appears as it should.  It’s a little better in HTML, so I’ll be linking instead of embedding from here forward. You can find today’s visualization here.

The ebb and flow of the use of trains in border crossings is interesting on its own, but by comparing it to the ebb and flow of personal vehicles used in border crossings, you learn more about both data sets.

Which brings me to the value of parallelism, Tufte’s topic in this week’s reading, “Parallelism: Repetition and Change, Comparison and Surprise” from “Visual Explanations.” He explains how valuable it is to look at data sets at once, in one graph, than have several different graphs across time that each stand on their own. Of course, it is possible to clutter up a visualization with too much information, so one must be careful.

Tufte also focuses on the capabilities of computers in allowing a user to navigate through complex data to the part they want to focus on, permitting them to repeatedly listen to and analyze a certain part of a musical composition, for example.  This relates to the power of interactive tools in data viz, and generally journalistic content.  Break it down into digestable chunks, let people step in or out of the content as much or little as they want.  The details are there, but you don’t have to absorb all of it to get the point.  Or go ahead and absorb as much as you want.  Have fun exploring one chunk very deeply, because you want to get its nuance. It’s up to the user to make his or her own personalized experience.

Because of these benefits of parallelism, the concept has been used to help people understand information in a literary sense for years — I still remember learning about this in high school, maybe middle school.  And a graph showing multiple sets at once is extremely popular, and one of my favorite types of visualizations.  Color one line different from the others, and you’re making a point of analysis.  Keep it objective, and you’re opening analysis up to the user.  Versatile, and ripe for as much depth, or lack of depth, as a user wants.

The first time I was introduced to parallelism was with the Name Voyager, looking at trends in baby name popularity.  The concept has showed up in some of the New York Times’ visualizations, such as the 2008 box office receipts graph.  And even as I write this, I ran across this tweet from @MacDivaONA (Chrys Wu) pointing me to a graph using parallelism to relate the years of time travel in various movies.  I spent 20 minutes looking at it, and I know I still haven’t grasped half the nuances. That’s the point.  It is, as Wu writes, a “datavizgasm.”

Now, that last piece may not be telling a news story, per se, but I would argue that journalism means conveying information, and if it captivates someone’s interest, it does tell a story. What’s the earliest year that has been time traveled to in a movie?  The latest?  Do paths of time traveling characters ever intersect?  (When it comes to asking if something’s journalism, I would come down with data guru extraordinaire Adrian Holovaty.  When asked the same question re: publishing databases online, such as his Everyblock, Holovaty said, “Who cares?”)

For this last graph, the makers have cataloged their creation process (thanks!) at Information is Beautiful.  It’s informative to see the iterations the graph goes through.  Parallelism as a graph form does pack a punch.  But to do it right, it can’t be too confusing, and there must be a strong Data-Ink ratio, to use a Tufte term.  All the lines drawn on the page, or as many as possible, should have to do with data.  Creating content concisely is important whether you’re writing, editing, designing or coding.  And that sentence, right there, is a parallel structure.