purpose

You spent time and effort on a data project and it ends up in unexpected places. Do you just shrug and let it pass or do you try to get a handle on the work so that it’s not misconstrued out of context?

In the land of what-if and what-about, it’s surprisingly easy to get stuck staring at your work, thinking about how your audience will hate it. You have to let it go.

Every now and then, the work can feel like too much, but that usually means I’ve lost sight of the point.

It is okay to fill the void with something fun.

Visualization for the sake of visualization is a drag and fleeting. Find purpose for your work.

Without purpose, there isn’t a whole lot to grasp on.

When you visualize aspects of the data instead of just the data itself, what you show grows more obvious.

It still amazes me that you can give multiple people the same dataset and the results can vary depending on questions, goals, and audience.

There’s visualization for analysis. There’s visualization for presentation. There’s overlap between the groups, but the differences require a varied approach.

The two approaches answer two different questions.

Ben Fry using the “tropiest of design tropes”, describes his goals for visualization.…

Visualization as template-filling content is lazy visualization that no one draws benefit from. Give people a reason to care.

The New York Times published an election map. A lot of people did not like the map, arguing that it was an inaccurate representation. Those who did like the map argued that one must consider intent before throwing a map to the flames.

What happens when intended use and actual use do not match up?