Graphic Sirens
Graphic Sirens
In high-stakes situations we cannot measure success by degrees. It’s a boolean all-or-nothing. They see it or they do not. Attracting attention is all that matters.
After years of wandering, we have a name for this newsletter. Welcome to Chartography!
This week is a great read, featuring a colorful batch of sundries plus the third installment of the “How to value data graphics” series.
Sundries
💷 The Economist is famous for its witty covers. I’m in the midst of identifying all with colorful information graphics, dating back to the early 1960s. See a favorite pie-chart cake below, and the emerging collection on Twitter.
🎟️ Ben Jones will host me to the Data Literacy virtual stage to chat Visionaries books Thursday February 23rd. He is giving away Nightingale, Willard, and Marey volumes for the best audience questions. Register (free!) here.
📸 I just received a “photo cube” for imaging my rare books. I hope it will help create better representations of these inspiring works. Shown below is its first outing, shooting a new arrival from Hungary:
🌴 Flaunt is a fashion and culture magazine based in Hollywood, Los Angeles. They asked me the most surprising set of interview questions. For example: “What do you love about illustrators' point of view? What might they accomplish that writers cannot?” I’m glad to have data graphics featured alongside fashion, art, and party photos. See all the questions and read my responses at Flaunt.
How to Value Data Graphics, Part 3
In the opening essay, Beyond Insight, we appreciated the multitude of values that charts create via the doorman fallacy: It would be a mistake to define your doorman’s role as merely ‘opening the door’ and then replace him with an automatic mechanism.
Last week, in All Rhyme No Reason, I began discussing the importance of the visual presence of charts: Before they are read, and before there is any chance for insight, charts are valuable.
Next let’s look at another visual value charts offer.
Attention attractors
If you want your chart read, it first has to capture a reader’s attention. All higher goals, such as informing and learning, are downstream byproducts of attention.
What catches your eye? What do you pay attention to? Images are more powerful than text when it comes to grabbing a reader. Images do not have to be read. They engage you subconsciously by spiking instinctual curiosity: That thing is different from what I know, yet attainable—I want to go get it.
A chart may attract attention to itself. It may also drive minds to a bigger idea than what any single chart can contain. A chart is not always the ambulance, sometimes it is the siren that makes you look at the ambulance.
Billboard charts are like a carnival barker outside a tent luring you in, or a flashy magazine cover. Their primary job is to be noticed: to let you know that the thing exists. Any information about what’s inside is nice, but secondary. We see these kind of charts all over business graphics and throughout the history of social progress movements, including promotion of public health.
In 1900, W. E. B. Du Bois exhibited two sets of information graphics at the Paris Exposition as part of the American Negro Exhibit. They were big (way bigger than the largest Apple display on the market today). And they were bold.
Du Bois’s large-format and brash designs helped attract attention to the booth, a necessity as explained by Aldon Morris:
There was nothing auspicious about the space assigned to the Negro Exhibit, nestled as it was in the right corner of a room in the Pavilion of Social Economy. To garner attention from this unenviable location, this exhibit would need to radiate its own sparkle and originality. It would require an imaginative resonance causing visitors to pause and marvel at the mysteries conveyed by the displays arrayed in the corner.
—W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (2018)
What I have always found most fascinating about Du Bois’s work in Paris is how loud they are compared to his 1899 data visualization project, The Philadelphia Negro. His earlier entry featured lots of charts, but they are of totally rote design: black and white cookie-cutter charts that look like they marched out of a textbook about how to make bar charts. Stiff. Academic. They don’t cause you to pause for a close look.
Today, what kind of chart is especially built for attention? It’s easier to answer the negative: Software defaults usually do not attract attention. If you look like everything else, or look like something I’ve seen dozens of, then I feel comfortable skimming right past.
What attracts attention? Data graphics that are fresh. Data graphics that feel like they are from the future.
Bespoke human-in-the-loop charting is harder to skip. These designs include custom-coding and hand-drawing. Both feel more alive because they are in timely dialog with visual culture. Sometimes they are fashion-defining.
Personally, Gabrielle Merite’s work has my attention today. She fits visual metaphor and data, and then illustrates with delicious colors, textures, and composition. How can you not look?:
Data journalism, which is in the business of attracting eyeballs, is the best at attracting attracting attention at scale. I find its output impressive. Their spectacular contraptions have become some of the most popular news articles of our age. They’ve also created a batch of clever new chart forms, getting their stories read and also increasing data literacy for large populations.
But how to value attraction?
Ten years ago, we could value attention-getting through the lens of advertising. But it’s no longer a useful perspective. The Internet destroyed the creative-ad industry. The landscape is now a rent-seeking thorn-bush of bad incentives that has resulted in crappy Google searches and untrustworthy Amazon results.
Yet we all know the power of capturing attention is more precious than ever. When the stakes are high, the message isn’t the bottle neck. Getting the message air time is the tricky part. It doesn’t matter if you have the right answer if no one hears it. (The proverbial lonely chart in the woods.)
The stakes were high for Black American culture in 1900. Data graphics helped attract attention. The stakes were high when we needed to rapidly learn how to navigate an emerging catastrophe in early 2020. Data graphics helped attract attention.
In high-stakes situations we cannot measure success by degrees. It’s a boolean all-or-nothing. They see it or they do not. Attracting attention is all that matters.
Going forward
This is the second of three short essays about values created by seeing charts—before they are read. In the next edition of Chartography I will write about charts as peacocks: signalers of worth.
Onward!—RJ
Notes
See Du Bois information graphics at the Library of Congress and then read the book about the effort, Amazon, knowing that its reproductions are tiny compared to the real thing.
Of course, these attention-grabbing approaches can go too far and become off-putting (bar chart races?), as if the ambulance siren is so loud that it is destructive.
Enjoy more of Gabrielle Merite’s work via https://www.gabriellemerite.com/
I'm loving this series of posts so far, RJ. I'm also a huge fan of Gabrielle Merite's work. To your point, if we know--and don't we, as data practitioners, all know this on some level?--that data itself doesn't sway stakeholders, and that humans are not particularly logical (as Rory Sutherland suggests in Alchemy, which you mentioned in the first of these posts, I believe), shouldn't our aim be, then, to attract their attention and illicit an emotional response? "But we should avoid bias," many say. No, I say, we should have a very specific point of view and shout it from the rooftops. Because that might actually work.