VISUALIZING INFORMATION
by Marylaine Block
On several occasions librarians have asked me to speak about the future of reference service - if, indeed, there IS a future for reference service. I think librarians are worried that the simple delivery of information is not a growth area for libraries because that's where our primary competitor, the internet, excels, with its search engines and resources like Wikipedia.
Helping people make sense of the information they've retrieved is something else again, and that, I believe, is where the future of reference service lies. After all, who is dying to compete with librarians in explaining to people how to fill out online FAFSA and FEMA applications? Who is fighting librarians for the opportunity to show people how to select, combine, and chart a variety of data points in government data sets? Who else wants to help students analyze and retrieve the kinds of information needed to solve a problem or research a topic? Who else worries about making sure the information retrieved matches the user's purposes and level of knowledge and sophistication? Who else is interested in providing context for the information?
One of the most effective tools we can use to help people make sense of information is visualization.
This is especially important when we're talking about numbers, because the human mind cannot easily make sense of large numbers. We have no concrete sense of the difference in orders of magnitude from millions to billions to trillions and beyond. Once numbers get bigger than the highest ones we handle in our daily lives - say the size of a mortgage or car loan - we have no context for understanding them. Effectively, we count one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a bunch.
Present people with a concrete illustration, though, and they will get it. Take the Megapenny Project, for instance, <http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/default.asp>, in which one million pennies forms a solid wall almost the height of a man, while one billion pennies occupies the space of 5 school buses.
There's a shock value to statistics that are portrayed visually. Take the standard calorie charts. They're not terribly useful because we find it difficult to understand the descriptions of portion sizes. But go to a site like "What Does 200 Calories Look Like?" <http://www.wisegeek.com/what-does-200-calories-look-like.htm> and you'll be hit in the face with the fact that just half a bagel, or half a cheeseburger, or 20 gummy bears will use up that allotment. (The chart might be even more effective if combined with an illustration of how much exercise it takes to use up those 200 calories.)
Similarly, librarians at Cornell University used visual shock to convey to faculty how much their prized journals really cost by showing what else you could get for the cost of certain outrageously expensive subscriptions - see "Sticker Shock" <http://www.englib.cornell.edu/exhibits/stickershock/>.
We could, incidentally, afford to draw on that kind of visual shock in our own marketing, as OCLC did on our behalf in "Libraries: How They Stack Up" <http://www5.oclc.org/downloads/community/librariesstackup.pdf>. Among the startling visualizations is their demonstration that libraries are valued destinations, with five times more people visiting U.S. public libraries each year than attend professional and college football, baseball, basketball and hockey games combined.
Visualizations also make it easier to understand relationships between data - charting trends, for example, or charting complex guidelines to help people understand what they can and cannot legally do, as in these "Copyright and Fair Use Guidelines for Teachers" <http://www.mediafestival.org/copyrightchart.html> and "Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States" <http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/training/Hirtle_Public_Domain.htm>.
The new mapping tools make it easy for us to make information both concrete and usable for our patrons. Consider, for instance, how journalists have mapped their city's worst potholes, traffic, criminal activity, gas prices, and more.
How many of you have generated maps of local eateries near your library buildings and handed them out to your users? It would be equally easy for us promote our kindred local cultural institutions - our community's museums, historical societies, college libraries, theaters, concert venues, and parks - by mapping them. Drawing on your local history collection, you could map out a walking tour of important historical sites in your town (and along with it, hand out an MP3 player loaded with the entertaining account you've created of the events that occurred there).
One should note, however, that the most noted and influential map of information in the past several years is also the most deceptive: the famous red state-blue state map of the 2004 electoral distributions. If you examine "Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results" <http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/> you'll see how very different those very same results can look when the unnoticed assumptions behind their depictions are changed.
Visualization matters, both when it's done right and when it's done poorly.
Many librarians, like me, were raised on text. As people of the book, many of us have not been trained to think visually. That's why I recommend that all librarians read at least one book by Edward Tufte, the master of visual explanation. His works include Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and Visual Explanations. Or at the very least, consult A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods <http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html> for a simple display of what the various visualization methods look like.
Because if we can master visualization techniques, we can not only retrieve information for our users; we can help them understand it.
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COOL QUOTE:
The penalty for asking the wrong question can easily be decades of misunderstanding.
Peter Copeland. "Plate Tectonics." Engines of Our Ingenuity #2188, http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2188.htm
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