Interactive visualization is still alive

Phew. Close call.

New York Times graphics editor Gregor Aisch noted during a talk that 85 percent of readers didn’t click on the buttons of a popular interactive. So Dominikus Baur pondered the usefulness of interaction. The answer was yes. It’s all about purpose.

To clarify, Aisch recently came back to the 85 percent figure.

Knowing that the majority of readers doesn’t click buttons does not mean you shouldn’t use any buttons. Knowing that many many people will ignore your tooltips doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use any tooltips.

All it means is that you should not hide important content behind interactions. If some information is crucial, don’t make the user click or hover to see it (unless you really want to). But not everything is crucial and 15% of readers isn’t nobody.

Aisch then gives a handful of good reasons for interaction in news graphics. The gist, and what I see over here on this modest site, is that most people who come to interactive graphics on the web won’t care enough to click on things. However, for the 15 percent of people who do, it’s worth the added extra effort.

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Interactive or not to interactive visualization?

In a recent talk, New York Times graphics editor Gregor Aisch noted that only 10 to 15 percent of readers who visit an interactive visualization on their site actually click on anything. That’s a lot of people who don’t get everything that New York Times interactives have to offer, which begs the question: Is it worth the time and effort to make these things?

As with most design-related things, it depends on the goals and the audience of your visualization. Dominikus Baur explains in detail, drawing experiences from his own work.

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Interactive charts in R

highcharter

Interactive charts in R are still so-so, but if you don’t mind giving up some flexibility and just want something quick without having to learn a new language, there are a handful of options. RStudio highlights the highcharter package, which is a wrapper around the JavaScript-based Highcharts.

So the story goes that Torstein Hønsi, the founder and Chief Product Officer of Highcharts. was looking for a simple charting tool for updating his homepage with snow depth measurements from Vikjafjellet, the local mountain where his family keeps a cabin. Frustrated with the common flash plug-ins, and other proprietary solutions available at the time, he decided to build a standards-based solution of his own and then, of course, share it.

Write R. Get an interactive chart to export.

While we’re at it, you might also be interested in the R wrapper for Plotly, which is another JavaScript charting library, and htmlwidgets, which lets you work with JavaScript libraries within R (and highcharter makes use of).

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Interactive lets you fly through a software galaxy

Software galaxy

This is a fun one. Software Galaxies by Andrei Kashcha visualizes popular software package managers as interactive galaxies. Each node is a package and connections indicate dependencies between packages. Use the keyboard and mouse to explore the 3-D world, rotating and shifting through clusters in each galaxy. Mouse over nodes to see what you're looking at.

I don't know much about the makeup or structure of the package managers, but it's fun to fly around nevertheless. It feels like a game.

Find out more about the process or download the code on Github. [Thanks, Andrei]

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Linked Small Multiples

Small multiples are great, and the right interactions can make them even better. A primer and a how-to.

Linked Small Multiples

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Science Tourist: Cambridge Science Centre

Most of the science museums in Cambridge are like the Sedgwick museum I wrote about a few weeks ago: very interesting, and full of things to look at, but mainly historic and academic. They celebrate science as things that have been done before. What Cambridge doesn’t have is a more educational and hands-on museum about science. But not for long: on February 8, the Cambridge Science Centre will open a small exhibition space, filled with interactive displays, in a temporary location in the centre of Cambridge. It’s the birth of a new science museum.

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Ultimately, the Cambridge Science Centre hopes to find a larger, more permanent space, but for the next few years they’ve taken over the space of a former shop with levers, pulleys, buttons, sounds and lights.

I’d never really considered how new science museums are formed until I met the team behind the Cambridge Science Centre last year. They didn’t have a space at the time, but they had movable exhibit tables, each with a different theme, and they took them around to show people what they were planning to build. They took a few of the exhibits to SciBarCamb, an event for the Cambridge science and science communication community that I co-organised, and let the other attendees play around with it to see what we thought of it.

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Cambridge Science Centre tables at SciBarCamb last year.

Over the past months, the science centre team didn’t just show the exhibits to other science communication people, but also to potential funders, to researchers who might want to collaborate with the museum, and to children, parents, and educators. Part of this trial run of exhibits was to get feedback on the displays: is the message clear, is it easy to use, is it fun? Another part was to demonstrate to stakeholders what the goal of the museum would be.


Promo video for the museum, shot at the Cambridge Science Festival in 2012, where the same transportable displays were used to demonstrate the concept of the museum.

With this approach, they have now secured a small space for a few years, where the exhibits will be on display full-time. It’s a proper science museum, on boutique scale.

I got a sneak peek of the new space a few weeks ago, when volunteers were still busy setting everything up. Some of the exhibit tables were not set up yet, and all the walls looked bare. In the middle of the room was a table full of boxes and papers, and further down was a table with drinks and snacks for the volunteers.

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Birth of a museum

But in between the chaos, I could clearly see a budding museum. There was a display on how to build a bridge and another one that showed what eyes are made of, but on a larger scale the whole room was an example of how to build a science centre!

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I recognized some of the exhibits from my first encounter with them at SciBarCamb, and it already felt like my second visit, even though the museum wasn’t even officially open yet. I’ll try to pop in before I leave Cambridge, or else on my next visit to town, to see what the next growth stage of a science centre looks like.

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