Teaching:TUW - UE InfoVis WS 2006/07 - Gruppe 01 - Aufgabe 2

Poor Graphic

Never Bitten, Twice Shy: The Real Dangers Of Summer

Discussion of the original graphic

First impressions of the design

The first thing you notice when looking at this diagramm is: The shark.
Then some graphical symbols on a "line" which seem in a linear relationship. Then you see the horizontal axis, reading "More risk, less fear" on the left and "More fear, less risk" on the right, which is positioned at the middle of the graphic.
Then finally you get to notice the "numbers" and the legend if you don't get distracted from the nearly unreadable article text in the upper left of the image.

Now we could finally go on and try to understand the message of the graphic. But instead of doing that we will stop for a moment and just evaluate the graphic from the design point.

• Data-Ink-Ratio: This image has very bad Data-Ink-Ratio. As there a huge number of visual elements which not only aren't needed to display the data itself but instead even prevent/distract you from concentrating on the message of the graphic (e.g. the huge shark). They are completly dispensable as they add no info which isn't already given by the textual labels.

• Space: The image takes up a great amount of space but leaves entire regions of the graphic blank and so without use.

• Axis location: The location of the only axis in the diagram is somewhat disturbing. The axis is placed in the middle of the diagramm and suggesting a separation of the risk categorys in some way (e.g. into a negative/positive region).

• Axis units: There is no real way to tell the units and/or the ranges for the x- and y-axis. The only hint is the text on the arrow which reads "More risk, less fear" on the left and "More fear, less risk" on the right. Now you could think the data is ordered from left to right by increasing fear and decreasing risk. The risk decreases from left to right, which is what the axis says (and what we expect), but the risk categories are aranged in an ascending order. Which is slightly confusing as the expected ordering should be descending independently if the unit assignment is: x-axis:Amount of risk; y-axis:Amount of fear; or the other way around. So the reality is: The data is only ordered by the "odds of injury" and then simply placed on an ascending line implying a linear relationship.

• Text on graphic: Apart from the disturbing article text in the upper left, there are some comments (e.g. on missing values) directly on the graph which distract from the graphic's message, as you need to read them to check if they tell you something important, which they don't.

• Data density: Also here the graphic gets a pretty bad rating, as the amount of space (as stated above) used to show information about the dataset is in no relation to the number of elements in the set, which are only 13.

Detailed analysis of the data

The "The real risks of summer"-data in table form

Risk	Odds of injury1	Odds of dying	Fear Index2
Skin cancer	1 in 200	1 in 29,500	102
Food poisoning	1 in 800	1 in 55,600	257
Bicycles	1 in 1,700	1 in 578,000	233
Lawn mowers	1 in 5300	Not available	53
Heat exposure	Not available	1 in 950,000	229
Children falling out of windows	1 in 12,800	1 in 2,400,000	89
Lyme disease	1 in 18,100	Not available	47
Fireworks	1 in 32,400	1 in 71,200,000	59
Amusement parks	1 in 34,800	1 in 72,300,000	101
Snake bites	1 in 41,300	1 in 19,300,000	109
Drowning (while boating)	1 in 64,500	1 in 400,900	1,688
West Nile virus	1 in 68,500	1 in 1,000,000	2,240
Shark attacks	1 in 6,000,000	1 in 578,000,000	276

[1]Full row text: Odds of injury requiring medical treatment
[2]Fear index means: Number of newspaper articles written last summer about this risk

It shows us 13 risk categorys each with three types of information: odds of injury, odds of death and a "fear index", build on the "number of newspaper articles written last summer" about this risk category.

• At three Items are missing values, but they are still positioned somewhere
• Outliers ??? What to write about them
• There are three different dimensions of data in the picture, but where does the trend comes from?

** Odds injury
** Odds death
** Number of Articles

• Ordering on x- and y-axis seems to be the odds of injury
• No correlation to e.g. Number of articles. What should be the "Fear Index"

Better graphic

After taking a closer look at the data, we found out that the main message of the original graphic is not true. We explored the values with different diagrams. A rising odds injury doesn't always cause a higher number of articels. According to this conclusion we can not show the "fear-risk-ratio" in the same way as the source picture does, but we try to visualize the data in a new diagram. Because of the wide spread of the values, we had to use a logarithmic scale.

??? bitte bild hier einfügen ???

As you can see, there is no clear correlation between the different dimensions.

References

[Few, 2004] Stephen Few, Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: Elegance through simplicity. Created at: October 16, 2004. Retrieved at: November 12, 2006. http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=N2ATDQWY5VYKSQSNDBGCKHSCJUMEKJVN?articleID=49400920.

[Mizuno et al., 1999] Yoko Mizuno, Tufte Design Principle Project. Created at: January 26, 1999. Retrieved at: November 12, 2006. http://ldt.stanford.edu/ldt1999/Students/mizuno/Portfolio/Work/reports/tufte/ed229c-tufte-outline.html.

Links

• Beschreibung der Aufgabe 2

• InfoVis:Wiki UE Homepage

• UE InfoVis

• Gruppe 01 (Lamprecht, Frey, Matzneller, Mueller)