Have data viz innovations gotten stale?
Have you noticed that the top mainstream media outlets—New York Times, Washington Post, Economist, Wall Street Journal—have presided over a resurgence of beautiful maps, graphics, and other colorful forms of data visualization on their digital platforms?
Some new independent consulting companies are also creating totally cool interactive graphics to dramatize their storytelling.
For example, check out this haunting and beautiful data-driven video produced by The Pudding (pudding.cool), a digital publishing and data viz producer, on The Loneliness Epidemic, in Data: Who Americans Spend Time With. You learn why loneliness is a bigger cause of death than cigarettes; you also feel determined to reconnect with your own family and friends.
So why has Jonathan Schwabish, one of the gurus of the data viz renaissance, recently posted on his blog: “Lately, the data visualization community has wondered whether the field is getting a bit stale. Are we past the days of experimental visualization work?”
In his recent blog posting, Schwabish acknowledges that readers are getting tired of ginormous “scrollytelling” graphics that take too much time to scroll through. But he argues that innovation is far from dead, in part because of an array of new tools to create graphics that didn’t exist a few years ago, and also because of the advent of—you guessed it—artificial intelligence.
Schwabish, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and founder of the data communications firm PolicyViz, has written several books to help corporate and other communicators polish their messages. His 2021 book Better Data Visualizations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers and Writers, is a bible for anyone who wants to make a point for a busy reader.
The first rule of thumb, of course, is that any graphic has to tell a story. Schwabish’s other guidelines: show the data clearly, reduce clutter, integrate graphics and text, avoid confusing “spaghetti” charts, and start with the color gray so you force yourself to simplify.
Schwabish’s web page at the Urban Institute reflects his devotion to data, data, data, telling the story of threats to data integrity in the US government. In this blog post, he tells us how to improve on the tried and true but old-fashioned bar chart. Watch this space to keep informed about the latest trends in data visualization.