I’ve never really been fond of tag clouds, but Wordle, by MacGyver of software (and former drummer for They Might Be Giants) Jonathan Feinberg gives the representation an aesthetic nudge lacking in most representations. The application creates word clouds from input data submitted by users. I was reminded of it yesterday by Eugene, who submitted Lorem Ipsum:

I had first heard about it from emailer from Bill Robertson, who had uploaded Organic Information Design, my master’s thesis:

A wondeful tree shape! Can’t decide which I like better: “information” as the stem or “data” as a cancerous growth in the upper-right.

Mr. Feinberg is also the reason that Processing development has been moving to Eclipse (replacing emacs, some shell scripts, two packages of bazooka bubble gum and the command line) because of his donation of a long afternoon helping set up the software in the IDE back when I lived in East Cambridge, just a few blocks from where he works at IBM Research.

It’s April again, which means that there are messages lurking in my inbox asking about the whereabouts of this year’s Salary vs. Performance project (found in Chapter 5 of the good book). I got around to updating it a few days ago, which means now my inbox has changed to suggestions on how the piece might be improved. (It’s tempting to say, “Hey! Check out the book and the code, you can do anything you’d like with it! It’s more fun that way.” but that’s not really what they’re looking for.)

One of the best messages I’ve received so far is from someone who I strongly suspect is a statistician, who was wishing to see a scatter plot of the data rather than its current representation. Who else would be pining for a scatterplot? There are lots of jokes about the statistically inclined that might cover this situation, but… we’re much too high minded to let things devolve to that (actually, it’s more of a pot-kettle-black situation). If prompted, statisticians usually tell better jokes about themselves anyways.

At any rate, as it’s relevant to the issue of how you choose representations, my response follows:

Sadly, the scatter plot of the same data is actually kinda uninformative, since one of your axes (salary) is more or less fixed all season (might change at the trade deadline, but more or less stays fixed) and it’s just the averages that move about. So in fact if we’re looking for more “accurate”, a time series is gonna be better for our purposes. In an actual analytic piece, for instance, I’d do something very different (which would include multiple years, more detail about the salaries and how they amortize over time, etc).

But even so, making the piece more “correct” misses the intentional simplifications found in it, e.g. it doesn’t matter whether a baseball team was 5% away from winning, it only matters whether they’ve won. At the end of the day, it’s all about the specific rankings, who gets into the playoffs, and who wins those final games. Since the piece isn’t intended as an analytical tool, but something that conveys the idea of salary vs. performance to an audience who by and large cares little about 1) baseball and 2) stats. That’s not to say that it’s about making something zoomy and pretty (and irrelevant), but rather, how do you engage people with the data in a way that teaches them something in the end and gets them thinking about it.

Now to get back to my inbox and the guy who would rather have the data sonified since he thinks this visual thing is just a fad.

I’ve not had a chance to try these out with an actual project yet, but the Google Chart API seems to be a decent way to get Tufte® compliant chart images using simple web requests. Just pack the info for the chart’s appearance and data into a specially crafted URL and you’re set.

It’s a nice idea for a service, and I also appreciate that Google has kept it simple, rather than implementing it through a series of obfuscated and strangely-crafted embedded JavaScript (like, say, Google maps or their newer search APIs after discontinuing the SOAP protocol).