Ending the Infographic Plague | Hacker News Reader

Ending the Infographic Plague

theatlantic.com

152 pointstokenadult29 comments

The problem is that the idea of visually representing information has caught on with the general masses -- and 90% of everything is crap.

It wasn't really all that long ago that terms like "infovis" or "datavis" were novel and new to the great majority of people. Sure everybody was familiar with standbys like bar charts and scatter charts, but the idea that you could cram complex multi-dimensional data into a single, novel, picture was relatively new as a discipline.

So now everybody and their aunt wants to "visually represent information" even if it doesn't make sense to do so, or the representations chosen artificially distort the information.

The problems are many but boil down to three essentials:

- the art department produces this stuff ("it's visual, so it must be the art department's job"). This is a department that is fundamentally wrong for producing representations of quantitative information. But I'm not sure giving it to the bean counters, statisticians, engineers or other nerdly disciplines is any more right.

- it's hard to come up with new and novel ways of representing information. Tufte's come up with approximately one - sparklines. And he's widely considered the king of the discipline. A couple others get bandied about ad-naseum, Napoleon's March for example, and as a discipline it seems more geared towards taking apart other people's efforts at novel visualizations rather than producing new, good ones. Innovation in Infovis is rare.

- even when falling back on traditional techniques (bar charts everywhere!), they are open to abuse or misinterpretations depending on how the data is viewed. Have 1000 entries but only room for 10 in the graphic? Drop the other 990! Use logarithmic representations when linear would be better. Focus attention where you want with colors or other indicators. By choosing how the viewer gets access to the tables full of boring numbers, you can influence what you want them to see.

Infographics can be an entertaining way of educating the non-quantitatively minded reader without presenting tables full of boring figures. But I agree they are widely misused.

I go one further to say that infographics, as referring to the kinds of things that should be produced, should almost always supersede tables of boring figures. As it turns out, even if you're quantitatively minded and interesting in the particular topic being analyzed... it's still better to see a well-designed chart.

I mean, I can't help but look at the chartjunk tsunami and see opportunity instead of just so many dire straights.

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Also I don't feel that the real need is in innovation of new standard charts but instead in the field of merging visuals with quantities in a way that is fluent to human psych.

Having worked in Academia, charts are often used to reveal trends in large data sets. This is particularly true these days when the data is gigabytes of multi-dimensional measurements that require processing to derive the underlying properties. The only good way to present data like this is in charts.

Graphics are now very important to presenting your science! The results can't speak for themselves, because no one can understand them in less than a few days of study, so they need a translator.

Sometimes people do create the equivalent of link-bait info-graphics that do their best to make a small result look large. It's usually balanced by the rest of the paper being light on details.

These infographics are just the newest version of sound-bytes and headlines. They don't tell the whole story, but they tell enough that you can tell your friends and pass out the link, and feel like you know the subject without having to spend more than 5 minutes reading. What we're missing is the balance of listing methodology and explicitly listing sources. There's little to no onus on the publisher to fact-check their data.

As long as we live in a society with 1-minute clips on the evening news, we'll have crappy infographics.

Sure, and I currently work in academia and agree.

Doesn't mean we should worship the soundbites, though we do.

These "infographics" really don't deserve the name at all. They're almost 100% chartjunk and have a data-ink ratio approaching zero. It's almost as if the people who make these read Tufte and decided to do the exact opposite.

On the other hand, doing the opposite of Tufte is a pretty good algorithm for pushing a point.

Misleading facts aside, infographics and Top N lists are a worrying trend on the Internet in which discourse is polluted with mindless content farms that are less concerned with disseminating facts than they are with getting clicks.

I know it sounds elitist, but personally I pine for the years of professionalism and expertise in the media. Crowdsourced content sounds great in theory, but in practice, nobody has the talent/attention span/spare time to do it right.

I would have preferred an in-depth examination of a few examples, rather than a very brief look at a single part of a dense infographic. Errors are not forgivable, but there's a difference between a single error on a sheet that contains three dozen facts which are sourced and many deliberate distortions on a sheet with a few facts, none of which are sourced.

I'd agree that many infographics are just awful at conveying information; people aren't trained in stats to create or read these graphics.

infographics were once a good way of summarizing a crowded quantitative analysis easily. but somehow recently due to a bunch of them flooding the net,i am feeling an infographic fatigue.

Here's a blog that I've enjoyed reading about bad charts and infographics:

http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/

Lots of interesting material there.

(I have no connection to the blog other than as a reader.)

Junk Charts is addicting. I laugh. I cry.

The problem isn't the infographic it's people spouting bullshit statistics. This is hardly a new problem, learn which sites are trustworthy and which are not.

The only 'problem' is that infographics are really good at getting across a message and far more human friendly than just statistics.

Similar to correlation and regression. Great concepts, and can add a lot of implied rigor to a mountain of BS.

Having just finished reading Tufte's _Visual Display of Quantitive Information_ today, the example infographics make me want to cry.

While it is certainly a problem that many info-graphics misrepresent information to skew public opinion or attract viewers, picking one aspect of a rather dense packet of information and calling it wrong is hardly a public service.

There's a real information problem being represented here but non constructive commentary isn't going to make it better.

Perhaps a more adequate title for the article would have been: "Be cautious of Infographics."

But then again I guess that doesn't misrepresent the content of the article enough to garner the viewer-ship they were looking for.

It's a pity that infographics are abused so often, because they're honestly not a terrible way to communicate interesting statistics. I mean, the fact that they're getting ordinary people to look at data and pass it along to friends is pretty impressive. They do have an accountability problem though. Someone should build a platform for making, sourcing, and commenting on them.

I don't understand his points about the Princeton graphic. from the Princeton page he links to:

> *The projected budget increase in the financial aid program will continue significant enhancements the University has made over the past 12 years, including replacing all required loans with grants that do not need to be repaid. This year the average grant for a student on financial aid is $36,000. These efforts have dramatically increased the economic diversity of Princeton's student body. The 60 percent of this year's freshman class on financial aid is a striking change from the class of 2001 -- the last class admitted before the enhancements to the aid program -- when 38 percent of the freshmen were on aid.

The infographic being criticized in the article, an infographic trying to make a point about a public policy position, may not have used the most meaningful fact in the first place. If the issue is cost of imprisonment per inmate per year, then the correct comparison is to the spending per full-time student per year, which at Princeton and several other universities is higher than the billed full list price tuition, because Princeton has other sources of revenue besides tuition.

Spending per full-time student figures are collected by the United States federal government, by law, and are reported on the College Results website maintained by a nonprofit organization.

http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=18...

AFTER EDIT: While doing other things away from my computer, I thought about how the submitted article relates to the culture aspired to here on Hacker News. In February 2009, Paul Graham wrote an article "What I've Learned from Hacker News"

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

looking back on the first two years of Hacker News. He wrote then, "There are two major types of problems a site like Hacker News needs to avoid: bad stories and bad comments." He thought at that time that the steps Hacker News takes to keep out bad stories have been largely successful, and to this date there haven't been any big technical changes (certainly never downvotes on submissions) to screen out bad stories. The author of the submitted article says, "Think before you link" in her example of an infographic about the problem described in the article, and goes on to say, "So before you pick up that infographic, give it a good, hard look." This is the desired culture here on HN. Early in my 1132 days of participation here on HN, I asked more experienced participants if the expectation here is that links are submitted for comment, even if the submitter disagrees with the link, or if submitting a link is an implicit endorsement that the link has at least minimal quality. The participants who kindly replied to my question overwhelmingly said that I and participants here in general should just submit links that they endorse as worth a read, not crap links to stir up comments of disagreement. I agree with the author of the submitted link here that infographics are too eye-catching and resist efforts at fact-checking, and that is is worthwhile to check the underlying sources and facts before passing on a link to an infographic. Way back in 1954 the author of How to Lie with Statistics

http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...

pointed out that some lies about statistics are most easily performed with display graphics. Readers have to be on the lookout for such issues.

I don't know if I should say thank you or not. I want to say thank you because I agree that infographics have become a plague. But I'm also grateful because there overuse has led me to leave some awful blogs.

With great respect to the well informed comments here, anyone working at a B2C startup should at least consider the benefits in traffic and brand equity that regularly producing attractive and digestible infographics can provide.

Even without meeting HN level quality standards, many users appreciate these types of visualizations.

The annual cost of Princeton tuition in 2010 was $48,580. This is not true. That's the cost of tuition + room/board + etc.

This is a step in the right direction, actually. Instead of just filling the internet with keywords, they're filling it with information. Now we just need to train the SEO companies to make it good information and advertising will, for the first time in... ever, actually align with the public good.

The general complaint should be a different point - it's the misrepresentation of data that is the real culprit here. Infographics are just a way to represent or misrepresent data.

This is not specific to infographics, any article can present biased information.

> which shows that nothing like a majority of either sex are working over 40 hours per week

The graphic clearly shows that the majority is working 40 hours or more... he goes to International Labor Organization that confirms the data and then claims that they have "no source" - they are the source! So everything confirms the data presented in the original graphic, yet he finds it wildly implausible. Who's biased?

Are you referring to the author? Megan McArdle is a she

VCs seem to like infographics: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/13/visually-launches-to-automa...

$2mm to an infographic company - how do they expect to make a return? I have no clue what goes through VCs heads sometimes - I guess they get caught up in hype.

Speaking of hyped companies - what has happened to qwiki, quora, turntable.fm and shaker?

Don't forget color.com.

What was it, like 15 million or something?

This article says $41 million: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/23/color-looks-to-reinvent-soc...

Turntable is blowing up, in a good way, as near as I can tell. They closed their 'B' round a couple months ago: http://disrupt.techcrunch.com/SF2011/2011/09/13/turntable-fm...

Really - how do they plan on making $? Who would buy them? I don't know anyone besides VCs and a few friends that used it while it was getting all the hype. Now I know nobody that uses it now that the fad is over.

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