THE POWER OF VISUALIZED INFORMATION
by Marylaine Block
When I discussed some possible futures for reference service at the California Library Association <http://marylaine.com/ref.html>, I focused heavily on the value we create for users by not just finding information for them but providing context and meaning for information. One of the best ways to do this is by presenting it visually.
This is especially important when we're talking about numbers, because the human mind is poorly equipped to grasp the meaning of large numbers. Any number higher than those we have worked with in our personal lives, like the amount of our salary or our mortgage, are, for all intents and purposes, classified together in our minds as "a whole bunch." The real meaning of millions, billions, and trillions is effectively beyond our grasp (and maybe beyond the grasp of legislators who routinely deal in these numbers); That's why I like to point people to the Megapenny project, <http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/default.asp>, which visually demonstrates the substantial difference between million, billion, and trillion.
Numbers conveyed in charts are more readily graspable and have more dramatic impact than row after row of numbers in eye-glazing tables. Consider the nice charts OCLC has provided for librarians to demonstrate the economic impact of libraries, <http://www5.oclc.org/downloads/community/librariesstackup.pdf>. The visual demonstration of how visits to libraries exceed attendance at all professional and collegiate sports by a factor of five is a splendid response to the question, "With Google, who needs libraries anymore?"
Take a look at how somebody displayed the results from mining data about political books from "readers who bought this also bought these" systems at major web booksellers: <http://www.orgnet.com/divided.html>. That graphic representation powerfully conveys the findings in a few seconds; the details can be read at your leisure.
Consider also how librarians at Cornell University's Engineering Library explained to their faculty the problem of excessive and escalating sci-tech journal prices, <http://www.englib.cornell.edu/exhibits/stickershock/>. (Librarians, of course, are the fools publishers can count on to buy The Journal of Applied Polymer Science rather than the Toyota Corolla.) This visual demonstration was an important tool librarians used to convince faculty to join the fight to control the costs of scholarly publishing.
Those of us who have frequently used reference books like The Timetables of History, or Who Was When, already understand the way that concurrent visual timelines can contextualize any subject. Nothing exists in a vacuum, and art, literature, music, science, and historical events coexisting at the same time inevitably influence each other. The history of medicine and the history of photography have seen significant advances in wartime, for example, and the music of Wagner and the philosophy of Nietzsche had a powerful impact on the development of the National Socialist party in Germany. To help our users understand those coexisting influences, you can send them to concurrent timeline sites like HyperHistory, <http://www.hyperhistory.com/online_n2/History_n2/a.html>.
Mapping is another incredibly valuable way of providing context for information. The Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas helps illuminate current news stories by providing current and historical maps <http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/>. Consider how much more comprehensible the conflict in Iraq is when you view maps that show the Distribution of Ethnoreligious Groups and Major Tribes, or Land Use, or the distribution of oil facilities <http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/iraq.html>.
When people need information specific to their own community, Google Maps <http://maps.google.com/> allows you to create localized topical maps easily. Feed in "Restaurants near AddressOfYourLibrary" and you'll get a map you can duplicate and hand out to your patrons (which I would urge you all to do).
As people ask you for local information, consider whether they'd benefit from having you display it as a Google map. Here are just a few of the ways people have been using Google Maps: to map the locations for best gas prices (<http://www.ahding.com/cheapgas/>); public transit stops near a given location (see <http://holovaty.com/blog/archive/2005/04/19/0216>); traffic information (see <http://traffic.poly9.com/>); sex offenders (see <http://www.mapsexoffenders.com/>); Wireless Hotspots (see <http://www.tadl.org/wireless/map/>). I'm sure you can think of lots more uses.
A particularly powerful form of mapping is Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which the GIS Dictionary at ESRI defines as "an integrated collection of computer software, spatial data, related information, and supporting infrastructure used to visualize and analyze spatial relationships, model spatial processes, and manage spatial information." (See <http://www.gis.com/> and <http://www.library.wisc.edu/data/GIS/gisrsrc.htm> for more information on GIS). By allowing you to superimpose multiple types of information with geographic coordinates upon each other, it gives you to power to analyze relationships between data -- between, say, a community's geology, drainage, and proposed development, or between a library's buildings, its service area, and the demographic communities within it.
A necessary caveat because of the very power of graphic representations, however, is their capability for distorting information. We knew this even before people started using PhotoShop to alter images. After all, the mere fact of where you choose to stand to take a picture and what you select to shoot alters the "reality" revealed by the picture; those choices allow you to make a demonstration appear either sparsely attended or so big it shut the city down, or to make its participants appear to be either everyday middle-class people or obvious radicals and nutcakes.
Consider the famous red state/blue state map <http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/>. Because this map represents physical space occupied by states awarded under a winner-take-all electoral system, it appears to show Democratic voters hanging on by their fingernails to the edges of a nation bent on rejecting them.
Arrow down through this web site and you'll see that, since much of that physical red-state space has more cows than people, a cartogram that skews the size of the states to correspond to their population provides an entirely different sense of the meaning of the election data. Arrow down still further and you'll understand how, with electoral votes awarded by state, the red-state-blue-state depiction made states with substantial pockets of both red and blue voters look more monolithic than they actually are; the speckled county by county map gives a far better presentation of a country that's not so much red and blue as a mix of both.
That's why when we use a tool as powerful as graphics to illuminate information, it's especially incumbent on us to document and explain our sources and methods fully, and to explain any assumptions embedded in the data. It's our obligation, as information professionals, to honor the data, and to honor our users.
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COOL QUOTE:
...facts rarely present themselves cleaned up and alone, ready to be admired and fussed over. Instead, nature bestows her blessings buried in mountains of garbage, and scientists rarely know what they have their hands on until they've sifted through the mess, laboriously, patiently, piece by piece.
K.C. Cole. The Universe and the Teacup. Harcourt Brace, 1997.
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