Why does your data have to be beautiful as well as meaningful?

I must admit I had been looking forward to the last module of my Squared course, and not just because it would be the last one, but because of the nature of the assignment: an infograph.

Now that the assignment is out of the way and the course complete and I only have to wait for the pass or failed news, I have time to think, critically, about the whole thing. These are my musings.

We have more data than ever before, the amount of data we generate increases by the minute. In my daily job I suffer everyday the consequences of it: the means we use to collect data are not keeping the pace, the data I collect presents more questions than it answers.

Is perhaps for this reason that we fallen for the appeal of the latest fashion on visually appealing representation of data: infographs?

In the financial information services line and pie charts are still a must. In my opinion, they are the best infographs ever designed and they will never be surpassed because in their simplicity they are the most informative.

Looking at the infograph the team and I prepared, and going through it now that it has submitted and nothing can be changed, I can't help but thinking that this is a good example of what we are doing wrong with data: making visually appealing representations of it for the sake of it.

In support of this last point, I'd like to bring your attention to this book: Information is Beautiful. That's a coffee book of infographs (great ones). And to this website: www.christophermanning.org (I can spend hours looking at it).

A concern I have is that we seem to force ourselves to look at data to create a pretty story, rather than having a story supported by data.

Maybe because I can't resist pretty images. Here are some that didn't make it to the final presentation (thank goodness for that!)