Netflix maps and normalization

Companies collect detailed information on user’s habits, and sometimes they’re willing to share it with visual journalists. In this case, Neftflix provided The New York Times with movie rankings by Zip code, which the Times turned into noteworthy infographics in print and online on Jan. 10.

A key to making graphics like this work is “normalization.” Let me explain: If you chose to map the NUMBER OF TIMES “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” was rented in each town, that is not normalized. One town might have more people in it than another, so you end up measuring the number of people in each town more than your are measuring the popularity of the movie.

Mapping the RANKING of the movie takes care of this. A heat map showing a movie’s ranking in each location would provide similar results to a heat map showing the number of times a movie was rented in each location divided by the location’s population. (Or at least that’s my theory. I don’t have the data on hand to prove it.)

Another interesting thing to point out about the graphic: The print and online versions were vastly different. I first read the print version in the newspaper’s Sunday Metropolitan section. (Sorry, can’t link to it since it’s a full-page print graphic. I’ll just have to describe.) It showcased a large map of the New York metro region that showed which Zip codes favored “Frost/Nixon,” “Pineapple Express” or “Obsessed.” Below it were six small heat maps of the same region that showed the rankings of six movies.

The online version, which you can see at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/01/10/nyregion/20100110-netflix-map.html?ref=nyregion lets you scroll through the top 50 Netflix movies nationwide and see heat maps of their rankings in 12 Metro areas.

This is a good example of how visual journalists have to adjust their print and online presentations to fit the strengths of both media.

White House floor plan

Floor plans often make great infographic fodder. For instance, the Washington Post’s interactive White House corridors of power diagram provides a solid inside look at the Obama administration. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/westwing/index.html)

Often a flat blueprint works fine, but sometimes you might want to take a more stylized approach. Using Illustrator’s 3D tools, you can make a quick-and-dirty extrusion of the blueprint’s walls (like in the White House example) without having to move into a raster 3D program.

Here is a decent tutorial on the Vector Tuts site that shows you how to make a simple 3D floor plan. http://vector.tutsplus.com/tutorials/illustration/how-to-create-a-3d-floorplan-in-illustrator.

Some of the numbers the author uses for rotation angles don’t seem to match what he’s showing, but he presents the basic concepts clearly.

Book: Nudge

Humans are confronted with hundreds of choices every day. The way objects and messages are arranged affects these choices, and the people who arrange these objects and messages can be considered “choice architects.” For instance a cafeteria manager can decide to arrange food in a way that makes it easiest for customers to reach for healthy choices, that maximizes profits or that reflects the choices that people would most commonly make on their own with no encouragement.

The book “Nudge” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (http://www.nudges.org) tries to alert decision-makers that they are choice architects who must understand how humans behave. Without this awareness, the result can be apathy, confusion and harmful choices, such as bad investments, ill health and – as the diagram below shows – burnt pots.

In this example from the book, the most common design for cooking range burners and their corresponding knobs is shown at the top. Since the layout of the burners does not reflect the layout of the knobs, people can get confused about which burner they’re firing. (I’ve done this countless times on electric ranges.) Two alternatives are shown. I prefer the middle one, in which the burners and knobs are most closely mirrored.

I recommend this book to information graphics specialists. We need to think of ourselves as choice architects and understand how regular people interact with our designs. Will they read the intro first, or will they go straight to the chart? Should we be showing how the Libor (London Interbank Offering Rate) moved during the credit crisis, or do our readers just need an explainer on what Libor is? If we use the color red, will the readers think it refers to danger or decline? How can we design the graphic to lead the reader through its components in a logical sequence with intuitive symbology and colors?

Book: “Otto Neurath, the Language of the Global Polis”

Otto Neurath, designer and sociologist, made beautiful pictograms that invoked the data he displayed. If his units represented unemployed people, they might take the form of hunched, depressed silhouettes, hands in pockets. Days of travel across the ocean might be expressed as jagged ocean waves.

We often forget that information graphics need not be cold and clinical.  The book “Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis” serves as a tonic to that tendency.

The blurb for the book: “Austrian sociologist Otto Neurath was a seminal Modernist figure. Much attention has been given to his achievements in the fields of graphic design and philosophy (Neurath was a member of the Vienna Circle, founder of the Museum of Society and Economy, inventor of the ISOTYPE pictorial system and champion of the Unity of Science movement), yet his involvement with urbanism and architecture has been all but ignored. From 1931 onwards, Neurath collaborated with the International Congress of Modern Architecture and its chief exponents–Cornelis van Eesteren, Sigfried Giedion, Le Corbusier and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy–to develop an international language of urban planning and design. More experimentally, throughout the 1930s a fascination with visual media led to an attempt to franchise the Museum of Society and Economy by establishing international satellite museums. This volume contains a text by curator and writer Nader Vossoughian, which offers a fresh perspective on one of the most versatile intellectuals of the twentieth century.”

Flight paths

After a plane crashes, news infographics departments immediately turn to the Web for flight-path data to serve as the basis of a map or explainer graphic. There are a bunch of different sources for flight paths. I haven’t figured out which is the easiest to use or which provides the best information. But here are four examples of news maps made from four different flight-tracking sites.

Above: Map of US Airways flight that crashed in the Hudson

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/15/nyregion/20090115-plane-crash-970.html

Data from FlightView http://www.flightview.com/

Above:  Wall Street Journal map of Northwest flight that overshot its destination in Minneapolis.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125623517851801783.html

Data from Flightaware http://flightaware.com/

Above: New York Times map of same Minneapolis flight.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24plane.html

Data from Flightwise http://flightwise.com/

Above: Washington Post maps of Sept. 11 attacks.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/graphics/hijack091101.htm

 

Data from Flight Explorer http://www.flightexplorer.com/

 

Analysis of Iranian nuclear sites

With commercial satellites circling the globe it’s hard for nations to keep their construction sites a secret. Military analysts at various organizations keep track of these images and look for structures that could be nuclear facilities or signs of new activity at known sites. The satellite image above, believed to be Iran’s Qom centrifuge facility, was analyzed by the Institute for Science and International Security. Their report is here:

http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iran/Qom_Imagery_Brief_25Sept2009.pdf

Below is GlobalSecurity’s take on the suspected site:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iran/qom-imagery-090100-5.htm

When news of Iran’s centrifuge facility broke in September of 2009, photo wires were offering DigitalGlobe’s satellite images of the “suspected” site in Iran. Since the site location hadn’t been confirmed by U.S., Iranian or IAEA officials, news organizations shied away from using the images.

A few days later, the New York Times ran an annotated satellite image of the suspected facility on their front page based on an analysis by IHS Jane’s.

Here is the IHS Jane’s release

http://press.ihs.com/ihsjanes/iran+jane’s.htm

And an interactive version of the New York Times graphic:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/09/29/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-facility.html

Most of the military analysts use satellite images from either DigitalGlobe or GeoEye.

Reproducing currency legally

Using representations of U.S. currency in an infographic makes me nervous. But some times you just have to do it. For instance, you may want to show the security features on the new U.S. bills, analyze the symbols on our currency  — or just make an illustration that includes a dollar. (I’m assuming the McClatchy graphic above used an actual $100 bill and not a counterfeit one. But the laws of reproduction would apply even if it were an actual counterfeit bill being represented.)

Before doing so, carefully read the rules provided by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing on their Web site  http://www.moneyfactory.gov/newmoney/main.cfm/currency/regulations.

The key point is that you need to reproduce the image at more than 1.5 times actual size or less than 0.75 times actual size for ANY PORTION of the bill you show. So even if you are cropping in on Lincoln’s ear, the lobe can’t be actual size.

Hispanic population

While the Census Web site is generally your best bet for population data, you should consider using statistics from the Pew Hispanic Center if you are focusing on the Hispanic population. The Pew Hispanic Center provides a level of analysis that would be difficult for most infographic artists to tease out of datasets from the Census site, especially on deadline.

http://pewhispanic.org/states/population/

Some of you are probably curious about how Pew made this three-dimensional data map. I haven’t spoken to the cartographer who made this, so I can’t say for sure. But I have worked on similar maps using either Arcview’s 3D Analyst plugin or with the Bryce 3-D program. With Bryce you extrude a shaded data maps so that the percentage of gray in each county is translated into an elevation figure. Essentially you trick Bryce into thinking your data map is a digital elevation model (DEM), a file that cartographers use to portray mountains and valleys.

Tallest buildings

With the new tallest building, the Burj Dubai, getting ready to open its doors, it’s time to start comparing building heights again. Skyscrapers make for great infographics, and there should be plenty of opportunities for height-comparison diagrams in the coming years. By 2020, the Burj Dubai will be overtaken by three taller skyscrapers if funding holds out. (See graphic above.)

When you begin researching an infographic on skyscraper heights, start first at the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. (http://www.ctbuh.org) Their “tallest database” has emerged as the accepted source at many news organizations.

Disagreements arise over whether to count spires and antennae on the tops of buildings. For instance, the council doesn’t include the antennae on the top of the Willis Tower in Chicago. Also, be careful to distinguish between the tallest BUILDINGS and the tallest STRUCTURES. The CN Tower in Toronto and a TV tower in North Dakota beat out former record-holder Taipae 101, but they are structures, not buildings with occupied floors.

Here is a recent Wall Street Journal infographic that intentionally mixes tall structures and buildings:

And a San Francicso Chronicle graphic from 2001:

Taking apart the stimulus bill

This graphic is a bit dated now, but it still serves as an inspiring example of how you can take a dry numerical analysis and make it come alive.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2009/02/01/GR2009020100154.html

It shows at a glance where government stimulus money would go and when it would be spent. It is also a beautiful functional design piece that evokes falling rain and flowing water.

Here is the report that Laura Stanton and Karen Yourish relied on for the data in the graphic.

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/99xx/doc9989/hr1conference.pdf