✚ Debating About Visualization – The Process 172

Welcome to issue #172 of The Process, the newsletter for FlowingData members about how the charts get made. I’m Nathan Yau, and this week I was thinking about… spirals? What.

I was going to grace you with my 10,000-word thought piece on the nature of spiral charts and their relationship to life itself, but I’m placing it on the back burner for now. Sorry.

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✚ Visualization Critique: Giving, Interpreting, and Rejecting

Figure out the useful bits and get rid of everything else. Read More

Pervez Hoodbhoy and Scott Atran on hope and extremism

By Profs. Pervez Hoodbhoy and Scott Atran After he circulated his address to the UN Security Council on extremism (available here), Prof. Scott Atran received the following response from Prof. Pervez Hoodbhoy of Pakistan. Prof. Hoodbhoy is a nuclear physicist, … Continue reading »

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Scott Atran on Youth, Violent Extremism and Promoting Peace

On 23 April, 2015, Prof. Scott Atran addressed the UN Security Council, to our knowledge the first time an anthropologist has ever been asked to speak to this body. In particular, he spoke to the Ministerial Debate on ‘The Role … Continue reading »

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A path for redesign as critique in visualization

Redesign

Redesigning a visualization can be useful in teaching a point. Make a graphic better (or "better" depending on what angle you're looking from) with a different layout and visual encodings. Perhaps the most well-known is Edward Tufte's redesign from his book Visual Explanations in which he reworks a diagram used in decision-making for the space shuttle Challenger launch.

However, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg explain why such redesigns can be problematic and offer a more useful approach.

At the same time, redesigns can be problematic. Tufte had one huge advantage over the creators of the diagrams used to make the space shuttle decision: he knew the answer to the question they were considering, and he knew exactly which variables mattered. His redesign makes an open-and-shut case at first glance. Stare a little longer, and you realize that the bulk of the visual effect rests on just one data point, the dramatic outlier at the upper left corner. Remove that, and the trend takes a far more muted form. Would it have convinced a stubborn politician to call off the launch?

Indeed, is it really a good idea to give so much weight to a single outlying data point? Clearly in the case of the Challenger it would have been. As a general rule, though: not always. One wonders… Had the launch gone off without incident, could someone with Tufte's skill have created, from the same data, an equally convincing graphic about the wisdom of ignoring outliers?

Viégas and Wattenberg end with three rules of engagement: (1) maintain rigor, (2) respect the designer, and (3) respect the critic. Or, "WTF" doesn't count as useful, don't be a jerk to others, and don't take criticism personally.

Worth reading the whole essay.

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Applied Anthropology as Limit

Of late I’ve been saying that the constraints that come with applied work are useful for doing good theoretical and empirical work. Just as experimental models bring demands to the research process that can clarify methods and outcomes, so too … Continue reading »

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Nicholas Wade and His Determinist Genes

TroublesomeThe subtitle of Nicholas Wade’s new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, is transparent. In combining genes, race, and human history, Wade makes a simplistic argument: genes determine race, and race determines human history. Wade is …

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