Data visualization combines principles from psychology, usability, graphic design, and statistics to highlight important data in accessible and appealing formats. Doing so helps bridge knowledge producers with knowledge users, who are often inundated with information and increasingly pressed for time.
See Full PDF See Full PDFAll social and policy researchers need to synthesize data into a visual representation. Producing good visualizations combines creativity and technique. This book teaches the techniques and basics to produce a variety of visualizations, allowing readers to communicate data and analyses in a creative and effective way. Visuals for tables, time series, maps, text, and networks are carefully explained and organized, showing how to choose the right plot for the type of data being analysed and displayed. Examples are drawn from public policy, public safety, education, political tweets, and public health. The presentation proceeds step by step, starting from the basics, in the programming languages R and Python so that readers learn the coding skills while simultaneously becoming familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of each visualization. No prior knowledge of either Python or R is required. Code for all the visualizations are available from the book's website.
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Government Information Quarterly
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In this paper I advance the theory of critical communication design by exploring the politics of data, information and knowledge visualisation in three bodies of work. Data reflects power relations, special interests and ideologies that determine which data is collected, what data is used and how it is used. In a review of Max Roser's Our World in Data, I develop the concepts of digital positivism, datawash and darkdata. Looking at the Climaps by Emaps project, I describe how knowledge visualisation can support integrated learning on complex problems and nurture relational perception. Finally, I present my own Mapping Climate Communication project and explain how I used discourse mapping to develop the concept of discursive confusion and illustrate contradictions in this politicised area. Critical approaches to information visualisation reject reductive methods in favour of more nuanced ways of presenting information that acknowledge complexity and the political dimension on issues of controversy.
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Arxiv preprint arXiv:1008.1188
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The policy making process in public authorities is nowadays usually an offline process. ICT is just very conservatively used, which also limits the inclusion of citizens' opinions. In difference the ICT sector consists of a rapid development in the area of eParticitpation and also in data-storing approaches and visualizations. But today it is hard to assign such new technical approaches to the policy modeling process, because of their non-ICT orientation. In this paper we introduce a new detailed ICT-based policy modeling process and an assignment of some modern ICT technology features. To support decision-makers, the main contribution of this paper is an assignment of useful visualization-types to the technological features and furthermore to the ICT-based policy-making process. Therewith we describe an approach how interactive visualizations can lead to a more effective policy making.
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MedieKultur: Journal of media and communication research
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This paper argues that visualisation conventions work to make the data represented within visualisations seem objective, that is, transparent and factual. Interrogating the work that visualisation conventions do helps us to make sense of the apparent contradiction between criticisms of visualisations as doing persuasive work and visualisation designers’ belief that through visualisation, it is possible to ‘do good with data’ [Periscopic. 2014. Home page. Retrieved from http://www.periscopic.com/]. We focus on four conventions which imbue visualisations with a sense of objectivity, transparency and facticity. These include: (a) twodimensional viewpoints; (b) clean layouts; (c) geometric shapes and lines; (d) the inclusion of data sources. We argue that thinking about visualisations from a social semiotic standpoint, as we do in this paper by bringing together what visualisation designers say about their intentions with a semiotic analysis of the visualisations they produce, advances understanding of the ways that data visualisations come into being, how they are imbued with particular qualities and how power operates in and through them. Thus, this paper contributes nuanced understanding of data visualisations and their production, by uncovering the ways in which power is at work within them. In turn, it advances debate about data in society and the emerging field of data studies.
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Trends in ecology & evolution
Visualisations and graphics are fundamental to studying complex subject matter. However, beyond acknowledging this value, scientists and science-policy programmes rarely consider how visualisations can enable discovery, create engaging and robust reporting, or support online resources. Producing accessible and unbiased visualisations from complicated, uncertain data requires expertise and knowledge from science, policy, computing, and design. However, visualisation is rarely found in our scientific training, organisations, or collaborations. As new policy programmes develop [e.g., the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)], we need information visualisation to permeate increasingly both the work of scientists and science policy. The alternative is increased potential for missed discoveries, miscommunications, and, at worst, creating a bias towards the research that is easiest to display.
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