This week's Effect+Affect: What can dinner parties teach us about dataviz 📊? Thanks to ensemble perception, your brain is weirdly good at parallel processing faces, grass, and zillions of lines on charts.
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Eli Holder
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Maker / geek! ❤️ Data, design, dataviz, product, systems, clojure, feedback & mischief. He/him.
Ensemble perception is part of the power behind strikingly detailed visualization's like Fernanda Viegas + Martin Wattenberg's wind maps, Periscopic's US Gun Deaths, and Nadieh Bremer's Wars.. as well as more utilitarian charts like jitter plots.
Is Taylor Swift a CIA psyop? No? Don't think so? What if you hear about it four more times? In our second post for Effect+Affect, Gabby and I unpack how "Truth by Repetition" can make absurd information seem more plausible and what it means for data communication.
https://effaff.com/repeat-after-me-truth-by-repetition-effect/
Our first post is here. We look at how contrast effects in information design can convince college students that a disease with an 11% risk is more likely than one with 12% risk.
How did this happen? What does it mean for dataviz design?
...and overstate _everything_ in a way that's academically questionable, but hopefully exciting? And, of course, we'll invite the research community to call us on our bullshit and share any discussions that pop up as we go! Hooray science!
...something more approachable. So every week(ish) we'll pull one of our favorite studies from the stack, unpack the findings and relate them back to data design, and maybe turn some of the results into a hopefully not-too-reductive postcard.
Along the way we'll sensationalize, editorialize...
Gabby Merite and I are doing a newsletter! We're calling it Effect+Affect. You can sign up at https://effaff.com
The idea: We think data design research is super cool. We use it in our own design work. But academic papers are Zzz and intimidating. So we're attempting to translate our favorites into...
New Nightingale post!
Political polls in the news are like reality TV for people who like spreadsheets. They’re a fun guilty-pleasure, but they’re not exactly a public service and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. They’re also low-key toxic.
In this research roundup, I unpack three recent dataviz 📊 studies and consider how cliches in political data journalism can subtly undermine the democratic process.
https://nightingaledvs.com/divisive-dataviz-how-political-data-journalism-divides-our-democracy/
@mduvekot ha, I guess surprise is relative?! I think it's non-trivial (or at least not widely understood) that these takeaways are relative and and not necessarily responsive to the absolute values. Also unclear why people on the left half _reduce_ their perceived risk but it doesn't seem to affect people on the right half? Like why isn't the influence symmetric? If they were using an exponential curve as their mental model then you'd expect people on the right to increase their perceived risk.
@mduvekot yeah I suspect there are tweaks to charts / annotations that might influence some of the issues here. There are a few different studies that suggest social comparisons are independently distortive though, which was the interesting part for me.
Of course, that isn't to say the other studies weren't _all_ using weird charts 😂, but the effect is at least independent of the way it's presented in this particular screenshot.