Infovis keynote: Matthew Ericson
29 October 2007
[from Fernanda Viégas at Infovis'07]
Information visualization for lay users seems to be a pervasive theme at the InfoVis conference this year. Matthew Ericson, Deputy Graphics Director at The New York Times, gave a keynote entitled: "Visualizing Data for the Masses: Information Graphics at The New York Times".
He explained how a 30-person team creates the impressive infographics and visualizations we see on the newspaper every week. Matt emphasized their role as journalists (instead of illustrators) and explained how they get from raw data to finished graphical pieces that make information understandable for more than a million readers.
[link: ericson.net (infovis presentation slides, ZIP format, 70mb)]
air pollution helium balloon brand-based collaborative tag clouds tkaap video tracking interface BMW kinetic sculpture flokoon visual search pulsating emotion organism cinema redux film mosaics laser-cut sound analysis sculptures caffeine usage arcs zoomii visual amazon store mapping scientific citations collective prediction network all the water in the world reflect conversation table
I was happy to hear Matt talking about some of the intricacies of bringing visualization to “the masses.” For instance, he mentioned how certain visualization techniques that are favored by the scientific community actually do not work well for lay users. Premier in this category was the scatterplot. That’s right, good ol’ scatterplots are not used by the NY Times because readers simply can’t make sense of them (a lot of people expect to see time on the x-axis.)
The other takeaway from Matt’s talk was his emphasis on the importance of textual explanations on infographics. His team always creates callouts and headlines explaining the most important points shown on the visualizations/graphics. By guiding readers’ attention, these explanations and short stories create important entry points into the visualizations.
Bonus material: one of the coolest moments in the talk was the meet the entire NY Times graphics team in Simpsons style (see image below, Matt is on the top row, fifth from the left).
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