Critiques

Critiques - are examinations of specific visualizations. The idea of a critique is to examine something closely to learn from it (not just to criticize). The pages here aren’t typical critiques - they are more “lessons built around an example.”

In many cases, I also use redesign where I try to explore alterntives as a way to learn.

Learning to critique - that is, learning to learn by examining examples - is a useful skill unto itself (one we emphasize is class). There is a Tutorial on Critique that gives some basic strategies for learning to learn from examples. It suggests a stylized way to do critique (that I recommend in class). The critiques here do not follow the formula - but they all are attempts to learn lessons by looking at examples.

Let’s look at the “Airline Route Maps” (the ones that are in the back of an airline magazine) as a way to explore the importance of task and how understanding task and data can lead to novel designs. It will show us a different way to think about node link diagrams more generally.

Core lesson: think about what a visualization makes easy to see. Different representations make some things easier, and harder. And some issues with dealing with geographic data in the US.

This comes from a New York Times story from August, 2024 The Geography of Unequal Recovery. Curiously, this page doesn’t show up well in my web browser, the images are from the mobile app (on an iPad).

Here is the “headline” (what appeared in the app “front page” that intrigued me):

This is a lesson on Axis Truncation for Line Graphs. It was inspired by a graph in the New York Times.

Don’t make the wrong thing easy to see. Here’s a real example from my own work where a seemingly innocent line graph was misleading, and needed some serious redesign.

Critiques

Airline Route Maps: An interesting Solution to a Node-Link Problem

Unemployment Changes Across The Country

College Attendance Line Chart

A Robot Performance Graph Mistake