How we read maps and dataviz - new research needed?

There's a fairly long academic tradition of looking at how humans interact with maps but, in my view, there is a need to revisit such research in relation to the new wave of digital mapping and dataviz currently available online. Some of it is fantastic and some less so, but this isn't about being critical of the bad stuff. Instead, I'm hoping others will share what they've been doing or what they've seen (via @undertheraedar) to try to understand the effect of new dataviz/mapping on how we perceive/read maps - and what impact this might have on cognition/understanding of underlying issues. 

Early last year I had some discussions about this with a very helpful colleague in psychology at Sheffield - Megan Freeth - and I gave her one of my blog images to test with her eye tracking technology. The results are shown below, in sequence (click to enlarge). I've also put them together in a slide show if you want to download them all at once.

The original 3D image

Scan path from first 10 seconds of map viewing

Scan path for one minute of map viewing

Heat map showing areas focused on most

'Region of interest' analysis

I'm aware that I am probably just not up to date with the kind of research being done in this area but before going further I should say that I am aware of people across the world who have done work in these fields - e.g. Alan M. MacEachren and others at the GeoVISTA Center at Penn State and this study from Brodersen et al at Risø National Laboratory in Denmark - but I'm not aware of what's been done in the last 4 or 5 years in particular to help us understand the effects of new approaches to mapping and visualisation on cognition and perception.

Are we understanding more because of the new wave of mapping and dataviz? Are we understanding less? Are we just enjoying how things look and being wowed by the technology more than we are critically engaging with the underlying content? Has the method become the message?

I'm as guilty as anyone of posting maps and images on twitter and this blog without necessarily thinking too much, though my aim is always to inform and engage - but as the protagonist in David Lodge's Changing Places says, "Every decoding is another encoding" and my visual 'decodings' of spatial data will always be 'encoded' by the viewer in ways I might not have expected - or even want. It's always interesting to see how people interpret things and whether this aligns with what we'd hoped. This perception issue might also come up tomorrow when one of my maps appears in the new HS2 report in the UK - we'll see.

Anyway, thoughts and insights welcome via @undertheraedar.

Data visualisation at datavisualization.ch

With so many different maps, infographics and other types of visualisations appearing on the web each day, it can be difficult for those interested in the visual display of quantitative information to keep up with the tools of the trade. Thankfully, the people at Datavisualization.ch in Switzerland have put together a selection of the most powerful and useful tools currently available (see image below). 

The datavisualization.ch examples page

Click on any of the images and you'll see the flipcard format in action, whereby the image flips round and tells you where you can find out more about that particular image, tool and further technical information.

They included an example from Google Fusion Tables that I developed for a newspaper here in the UK but more interestingly they have highlighted a whole range of tools that are either quite new and unknown (e.g. CartoDB) or more for technical experts (e.g. data.js). However, there are tools here that anyone can use - even those with no technical knowledge (e.g. Google Chart Tools). Thanks to Alex Ghita for pointing this out to me.

So, definitely worth a look. I should also add that this is quite similar in nature to the examples provided in a joint CLG/OCSI project a couple of years ago which produced the DataViz pages - in relation to improving data visualisation for the public sector.

Visualising London Population Growth

Update, 7 June 2011 - See bottom of post for a new animation...

Following the theme of the last post - and the last series of posts with video content and animations, this is a short post on the development of London's population, by Borough, from 1801 to 2001. The data is, of course, Crown Copyright - and I downloaded the files from here, in case you want to know. There are a lot of data here, so how to make sense of it? First of all, an animated bar chart sequence, with the original 1963 Inner London Boroughs (i.e. not the ONS definition) in red and the Outer London Boroughs in blue...


You can see it in full size here, to enable reading of label names.

The next experiment in visualizing this data was to convert it into a Google motion chart. The results of this are shown below. You can start the graphics by hitting the play button and you can query them by hovering over any of the coloured bubbles. To label a bubble, just click it. It's a bit small here but this is just for illustration. Experiment with the tabs at the top of the initial chart to see the data in a different format. There's lots of options for experimenting here...



Finally, a view of what all this looks like spatially, in 3D.

As for the data itself, you can discover a lot from these visualizations, but the high point in population for a London Borough was Tower Hamlets in 1901, with 597,000 and the low point was in Brent with 2,000 in 1801 and 1811.

Postscript, 7 June 2011. I've since done a proper London animation for the Centre for Cities. A small version is shown below. For the full version, check this link.

dataviz - Improving data visualisation for the public sector

The topic of today's post is dataviz, a new website devoted to improving data visualisation - specifically focused on the public sector. It's a joint initiative between CLG and OCSI and is really quite an attractive new website with lots of interesting visualisation examples, including Time magazine's population density spike map.

There's a CLG pdf document about this new development here, and it explains all the 'what', 'why' and 'how' questions about the project. Finally, the gallery of examples is definitely worth a look...

Public Spending in the UK

The Guardian have been doing some interesting things with data over the past couple of years, including setting up their data store. One of the most interesting visualisations they have produced relates to public spending in the UK. The most recent version of this graphic (produced in conjunction with the Institute for Fiscal Studies), for 2008-09 reveals some interesting things...

• Total spending was £620.685 billion, up 7% on the previous year
  
• Department for Work and Pensions (state pensions, housing benefit, etc.) spending was £135.7 billion
• £94.552 billion was spent on the NHS
• Interest payments on debt were £24.1 billion
• 'Financial stability' measures (i.e. bailing out the banks) was £85.5 billion
• More money was spent bailing out LTSB and RBS (£36.9 billion) than on the Department for Communities and Local Government (£36.8 billion)
• DCLG spending for local and regional government was £25.4 billion

There's a fully fledged article on all this, and links to the downloadable pdf on the Guardian pages relating to this analysis. There's also a related flickr page for visualisations.