The Right Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Why Visualization?

We often hear a picture is worth a thousand words.  There is a simple reason this is true.  Our eyes evolved to be the best way to put information into our brains (speed and amount).  The amount of information that can be absorbed through our eyes is staggering and only limited by our ability to train ourselves to use our eyes to collect information.

Conversely, if we want to convey information to other people, we should also strive to do so visually.  Hence we must train ourselves to think visually so that we can then figure out how to transmit information visually to our audience.

Here is a short list of rules to help transmit information and concepts visually.  Special thanks to Glenn V and Brian R for assisting me with this list yesterday.

1) A visualization is not simply a picture.  A visualization must be information or a concept conveyed through sight.

2) Pictures that convey no meaning detract from the information being presented and should be eliminated.

3) The most casual observer should understand what's being presented even if they don't understand what's being presented.

4 ) Any process can be visualized...think flow chart, they are simply and easy to draw.

5) Data visualization starts with a simple graph, rarely, if ever, is it a table of data.

6) Data keys are key...never forget to use them.  However, keep simplifying your key until most of the information is embedded in the graphic.  Then you might have the option to eliminate the key altogether.

7) Never try to convey more information then the human brain has the capacity to remember... if it's important to be remembered.

     If the concepts are new they should be in the range of  3  (1st, 2nd, and 3rd law of thermodynamics)
     If the concepts are simple or familiar maybe it's  5 +/-2  (Directorates in your organization)
     If the concepts are extremely familiar or can be grouped, you might get to 7 +/-2 (Football teams)


I run the risk of violating rule number 7 if I go any further.  And it might already be too late...

IBM Has Many Eyes

Glenn gave me permission to post his email along with many of the comments he received.  Glenn wrote:

Last week I attended a series of talks sponsored by WINFORMS and IBM. The speakers were Brenda Deitrich -the leader of IBM's math department (now branded as Business Analytics) - and her lead visualization guy, Stephan Jou. It was exciting to see where IBM's math team has gone, considering that when I graduated I was impressed by the work they did but was unsure about moving there due to industry changes (cf. Bell Labs, Kodak).

But for this discussion, I'd like to think about the visualization ideas. Jou gave a tour through their web site IBM Many Eyes, as well as IBM Many Bills which focuses on depicting US legislation. Tim - what was the web site you were using with lots of visualization techniques? This looked very similar, where the public can upload their own data and try different and creative ways of visualizing their data.


Here are two of the IBM sites for a closer look:

Many Eyes

Many Bills


It got me thinking again about how Tim and Swish provided A8 with an interactive map, and how Brian developed interactive maps and sliders. These techniques are a major change in how we tell the story to decision makers and provide information to the rest of the community. We're used to building or using tools to make maps and other visualizations for ourselves, because we know how valuable they are to analysis. But each time we do, it usually takes a lot of effort, is hard to adapt on the fly (like FalconView), or is not presentable beyond the analyst (STORM w/ OpenMap).

I'm certain there is value in having a warm-base of graphics capability ready to support our analysts and AO's. But how can we get there cost-effectively? IBM sees a profitable market there - they bought the makers of SPSS not for statistics but for business analytics - data manipulation and visualization. Jou cited Leland Wilkinson's classic tome "Grammar of Graphics" about rule-based graphics language. Instead of building an Excel-like library of charts that often falls short (because "there will always be a need to tweak"), they aim to allow users to quickly build their own library with these rules.

Short of licensing IBM's new project when it's built and contracting their specialists, how can we do that? Do we need to keep reinventing the wheel (or settling for what Excel gives us) each time? Is any in-house effort doomed to follow our attempt to bypass Sharepoint with MIS? Is there any open source work that gets us most of the way there, and could we use it on the networks that matter? How much up-front and ongoing effort would be required to make a significant impact on A9, AF, DoD visualization?

I know some of you have pondered down these lines already. What do you think?

Regards,

Glenn