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Panel: The Impact of Social Data Visualization

In his famous talk at TED, Hans Rosling [7] used animated and interactive graphics to get his point across. Rosling’s energetic style and interesting message certainly helped, but the means he used were an incredible demonstration on the power of visual communication. From the perspective of current visualization research, though, the displays used were simple, and one has to wonder if they would have been accepted for publication at the InfoVis conference. This raises the question of whether our criteria for evaluating visualizations are really the right ones, and what other criteria there might be. Information – some argue – wants to be free. Certainly data that was collected with the support of public funds should be freely available, and a lot of it is, at least in principle. But access can mean many things, from easily usable tables of numbers to obscure data formats and querying interfaces to printed tables in locked PDFs. Availability of data does not equate meaningful access. Examples like the 2000 US Census [8] show that just making the data available is not enough if the format is obscure and the interface for accessing it is overly bureaucratic. Even simple visualizations like gCensus [4] and a project by Juice Analytics [5], which both create layers for Google Earth [3], finally provide access to that data years after it has been published. In a similar way, TheyRule [6] shows data that is available in principle, but that needed to be collected in one place and shown visually to make connections visible that were hidden in plain sight. An interesting problem that arises from the growing availability of useful data visualization tools for the general public is that while making data available so far did not necessarily lead to that data being actually used for investigation, be it by researchers, journalists, or just interested individuals. Will less data become available for fear of data mining by the general public? Will the possibility of connecting many different data sources make breaches of privacy possible that will lead to tighter restrictions on what data can be published at all? Of course, all of the above is more a question of general data processing than visualization. Freeing data from an obscure format does not require or even involve visualization, and neither do many kinds of analysis. What makes visualization so powerful is its compelling visual nature. Seeing a graph display numbers like unemployment or, recently, climate change, is much more interesting to look at and more impressive than reading a table with numbers. Visualization, therefore, is an agent of change, a powerful tool that needs to be understood not just in terms of mathematics or perception, but in terms of the impact it can have on the views and opinions of people.