For some time now, I have found that when trawling for stories and research papers of interest to share with my marine climate change subscribers, the internet –how very admirable its potential- has become a quagmire of repetition, mixed messages, the same story wrapped up in varying formats to suit varying readers but often it is text, text, TEXT......and more TEXT....but then, as if out of nowhere, “KA-BOOM” one comes across the most striking image. The screen is taken over with colourful lines lolloping across the page. Each flirting with other colourful lines turning their back to embrace a dotted line fizzing between every node that turned up to the party. And as I get all giddy with my new dream wallpaper, I realise that this wonderment is actually telling me something – and something really interesting! So of course this is shared on facebook, snapchatted , tweeted and emailed straight to anyone who would appreciate the experience.
Now what I am talking
about here is data visualisation and referred to by people in the know as
“infographics”. If you haven’t heard about this beautiful monster, that will no
doubt raise its head in your organisation any time soon, then read “Information is Beautiful”. I say read, there is no reading involved and you will turn pages
in a way that you never have before – with no rhyme or reason just anticipation
driving your finger tips on. And, I say monster because no pie chart or scatter
graph will ever meet your needs in quite the same way again...but it’s good,
let this beautiful monster in.
This passion of mine,
felt and shared with some twenty others in my organisation (Cefas; @CefasGovUK), was aggravated into
a fervent stupor on Valentine’s Day this year when The Guardian Digital Agency
ran a Data Visualisation workshop for us at The Forum, a venue organised for us
by Made Agency, as part of Norfolk Network.
Of course, I cannot spill
all of the beans as this would be unfair to the guys who ran the event but I
would like to feedback some key points from the day and share what researchers
interested in communications should be looking out for:
1) Do
you want to stay true to the data or provide a summary message? Check out these two websites for different approaches:
2) Everything
about design has meaning: the font, the colour and layout – so plan the meaning
before you design the message.
3) If
you are not artistic, there are several websites that will allow you to create
your own infographics, try typing some key words into a search engine such as:
“free infographics”, “tools data
visualisation” or “icon archive”
4) Infographics
can be interactive and if so should be intuitive and rewarding...one can end up
in a rabbit hole of data that they might not have known they were interested
in.
5) Statistics
can be made interesting for everyone, if they are packaged the right way: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen
The workshop inspired me
to develop more infographics for projects that I work on, and I have even
made them fully citable - http://figshare.com/authors/Georgia_Bayliss_brown/539795.
If you are interested in organising a similar event, please contact
@adamfrostuk @skelington or get in touch with the Norfolk Network Research
Communications Group to discover what other work is going on.
Keep thinking outside of
the box,
Georgia @Georgia_B_Brown
