Gratuitous Visualisations?
The Guardian’s usually very impressive @Datablog released this visualisation and blog yesterday asking how much do UK Journalists on twitter follow other journalists on Twitter. Guess what? They do quite a lot. I’m just not convinced that this tells us anything at all - or at least nothing beyond what we could of guessed. At which point you have to raise the question - why bother publishing it? I thought I’d cite the last point of Manuel Lima’s ‘Information Visualisation Manifesto’ to show why I think this is a bit poor, or devalues what data viz is about. The point is that we should ‘Avoid Gratuitous Visualisations’…
To the growing amounts of publicly available data, Information Visualization needs to respond as a cognitive filter, an empowered lens of insight, and should never add more noise to the flow. Don’t assume any visualization is a positive step forward. In the context of Information Visualization, simply conveying data in a visual form, without shedding light on the portrayed subject, or even worst, making it more complex, can only be considered a failure.
While I don’t think this visualisation passes this litmus test (mainly @datablogs do), I think the wider point is that this is only one example of a growing trend of gratuitous visualisations. Far too often I see colourful complex visualisations that tell us nothing useful but only add to the ‘cooing’ at what a connected world we know live in (and thw now ubiquitous ‘social network ball of wool’). Show me something I didn’t know, Stop adding to the noise!
