Tradeoffs in Information Graphics

Abstract

The visual display of quantitative information (to use Edward Tufte’s wonderful term) is a diverse field or set of fields, and its practitioners have different goals. The goals of software designers, applied statisticians, biologists, graphic designers, and journalists (to list just a few of the important creators of data graphics) often overlap—but not completely. One of our aims in writing our article was to emphasize the diversity of graphical goals, as it seems to us that even experts tend to consider one aspect of a graph and not others. Our main practical suggestion was that, in the Internet age, we should not have to choose between attractive graphs and informational graphs: it should be possible to display both, via interactive displays. But to follow this suggestion, one must first accept that not every beautiful graph is informative, and not every informative graph is beautiful. Our favorite example along those lines is the Crimean War data, displayed first in an exciting and innovative form by Florence Nightingale as an attractive graphic that still inspires modern designers, and then replotted in a boring but transparent (or perhaps we should say, transparent but boring) pair of graphs in Figure 6 of our article. Our display is not better or worse than Nightingale’s; it is different. The displays serve different purposes. Our graphs are better for revealing trends and comparisons in the data; hers is better for attracting interest in the underlying story. As we and several discussants wrote, it would indeed be better if designers and statisticians could collaborate (in this case, by drawing the Nightingale-style graph in a way that did not obscure the real patterns in the data, or by adapting our time series plots to be more lively, or maybe by some different, outside-the-box solution)—but, in the meantime, we are happy to have Nightingale’s graph on the front page and ours on the click-through. But the data graphics communities will only get to that point if we recognize the inherent contradictions between the multiple goals involved in graphical communication. Yes, it can sometimes be possible for a graph to be both beautiful and informative, as in Minard’s famous Napoleon-in-Russia map, or more recently the Baby Name Wizard, which we featured in our article. But such synergy is not always possible, and we believe that an approach to data graphics that focuses on celebrating such wonderful examples can