Now, to show the complete superfluousness of infographics, I have expressed the same information in another format, namely plain text (Internet MIME type: text/plain) encoded in ASCII.
Here it is:
The iPad has been out a year.
Analysts thought it would sell 3.3 million units. It sold 14.8 million.
Oppenheimer & Co. predicts tablet shipments will grow from 15.1 million in 2011 to 115 million in 2014.
Apple has 90% of the market share.
Five simple sentences that almost anybody could understand. The wc utility on my computer tells me it is 245 bytes.
These 245 bytes of English text/plain transmits exactly the same amount of information as the 200,939 byte JPEG image and does so without making me want to kick someone in the dick.
V amusing. I suspect the seemingly far greater willingness of ppl to spread infographics means they’re here to stay tho.
So infographics are like soft-core pornography then? But who says graphs can’t be sexy? It’s only when ‘ic’ and an otherwise-redundant “info” are added on that one loses interest.
Part, if not most, of the problem with this example is the information is not expressed very interestingly, in text or visually (click through to see the pretty horrendous picture talked about, and break Tumblr’s tyranny of the obfuscating link-post). Individually the statements are informative, and probably very interesting if that’s your business, but there’s no greater meaning or correlation to be drawn from the way they’re put together. So in a sense (unless you can think of some more important point to be found in the information), no traditional graph is necessary or even possible, and putting it in an infographic is just tarting it up (see how I’m sticking with the metaphor here - or do I need to draw a picture with it?) in a vain attempt to make it more interesting than it actually is.
The overuse of infographics also feeds into a distrust of more appropriate graphs - like the recent discussion of a dramatic graph of the rise and fall of different music formats: excellently deconstructed on Business Insider here, but also in this reconstruction by The Rich Girls are Weeping, which finished up by saying:
“As a consultant, I can select a chart format to say, well, pretty much anything to get my point across. If I chose a different format, the story would be very different. But this is the one I want to tell, and I have the tools to do it.”
Which is broadly true, in terms of generalisations like lies, damn lies and statistics, but it’s often not the fault of the graphics or even the process of making the graphics as it is the inability of people to read graphs with a critical eye. In this case, apart from a few damning errors like saying “Global music turnover” for US figures only, the original chart is technically correct and accurate. It doesn’t adjust for inflation, but that should be obvious because it doesn’t say it does (and anyone reading the graph should mentally factor that in, or go look for the adjusted figures: but then inflation adjusting is not an infallible tool either - hence the conscious note about using 2011 dollars for ease of relatability, but then what about levels of disposable income rather than just real purchasing power for all goods?). The adjusted chart is a better graphic, but it’s not objectively more correct. And to create one, or properly appreciate it, you need to know how to criticise the other.
* * *
There was a BBC documentary series a little while ago called The Beauty of Diagrams, which featured as one of its episodes Florence Nightingale’s ‘rose diagram’ of mortality during the Crimean War, which was basically - but not entirely - a polar area diagram of mortality separated by causes for each month, April-March, of the years 1854-56. It is a beautiful and, on the surface, effective representation of how disease outstripped all other causes of death amongst the army. Yet it is also extraordinarily misleading, because the number of deaths is not represented by the area of each segment, but its length (radius), although the former increases exponentially with the latter and dominates the image - amplifying the real extent of the information intended to be conveyed. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the documentary was presented by Marcus du Sautoy, “Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford”, no mention was made of this slight complication.
In a sense, it is like the inflated revenue levels of the music industry chart; except those figures represented actual figures before (typical) adjustment, rather than an effect of the graphical presentation itself. To be fair to Florence Nightingale, she was working in a new medium - graphics were not a widely accepted means of presenting hard facts even in the Victorian age - and without modern calculators - it’s quite complicated to work out what radii would give the correct areas for partial segments [technically the term is sector rather than segment] or even the simpler method of stacking she used [see below], and really it would not make for a readable graph. There’s an Economist article on three historically important charts which sidesteps the issue slightly:
“As with today’s pie charts, the area of each wedge is proportional to the figure it stands for, but it is the radius of each slice (the distance from the common centre to the outer edge) rather than the angle that is altered to achieve this.”
Only to reveal an even greater flaw:
“Nightingale’s chart is a beautiful and persuasive call to action, but it is not perfect. The red, black and blue wedges are all measured from the centre, so some areas mask parts of others.”
Although, to be fair, that would impact negatively on the message she wanted to show, if the largest wedges (deaths from disease) were not so massively greater to begin with. The other two charts featured in the article are much better: Minard’s sublime ‘map’ of Napoleon’s Russian campaign, which ought to be everyone’s favourite graphic; and another which would be unremarkable if not for its age, an early combination of bar chart and line graph from a Scottish political economist (itself the finest and earliest of the social scientific disciplines, in my opinion), “Shewing at One View the Price of The Quarter of Wheat, & Wages of Labour [“of a Good Mechanic”] by the Week, from the Year 1565 to 1821” dating from that year - itself an early analysis of inflation. Yet as the article notes, this would-be “infographic” (and now perfectly tame for the standards of the genre) may have met with worse charges than superfluousness:
“…Playfair was already making a leap of abstraction that few of his contemporaries could follow. Using the horizontal and vertical axes to represent time and money was such a novelty that he had to explain it painstakingly in accompanying text. “This method has struck several persons as being fallacious”, he wrote, “because geometrical measurement has not any relation to money or to time; yet here it is made to represent both.”
The main thrust of the article is the use of graphics for persuasion and thus the effective display of information, but equally important are the mathematical and imaginative skills to process and critically consider the information so presented. Now that ought to be made into an infographic.
