MLA 2018: A Bigger Boat: Data Visualization Lessons from the Movies

A Bigger Boat: Data Visualization Lessons from the Movies. Presented by Trish Valliancourt from St. Catherine University.

(Due to the presenter’s partner being ill and some unfortunate technical difficulties the session was shortened.)

Data visualization is all about packing lots of information in a finite space. But how do you create the most impact? Turns out there are key ways we can guide our audience to read information in ways that the brain can easily process.

Preattentive attributes are visual properties that our brains take in without consciously thinking about them. Things like: color, size, shape, motion, 2D vs 3D, length vs. width, and spatial positioning are all preattentive attributes.

If you choose images that subconsciously distract your audience, then all attention is drawn to the graph rather than the information presented. The data should always pop, not the graph. When we consider each of these attributes, we can make the best choices to help draw our audience to the target information instead of the overall visualization.

Example: Look at the table below. On how many days did Crisp sales exceed 160 bars?

·         Image 1: Looking for the answer in the raw data proves difficult and time consuming. This is not the best way to present information.

·         Image 2: A line graph makes it easier to see how sales of each item rise and fall, but it still takes our audience some time to consider the lines and numbers.

·         Image 3: So much easier! There is a red line marking the target quantity (160) and a red circle around the exact day when sales of Crisp exceeded 160.

Tips about preattentive attributes:

•      2D images much easier for us to process than 3D images.
•      Length is also easier than width on our brains.
•      Too many attributes can be a hard to handle. Use no more than 4. In the example above, we could go further and use grey scale for all other types of bars and only leave Crisp in color.
•       “It is not how much information there is, but rather how effectively it is arranged.”~ Edward Tufte

 

--Xenia @GLCL