Bravo, Thomas. I particularly like that the New York Times version requires an explanation to make any sense of it*, whereas I didn’t need a single word of your explanation in order to make sense of your version.

* I can only assume the New York Times explanation was effective – me being an average reader with the attention span of a goldfish, I couldn’t be bothered to waste my time reading it. The marketing folks that constantly push these ineffective infographics would do well to consider that remark.

I’m curious that the US shows no danger next to it compared to some of the others?

Well done. Very clear now, although the “How much debt is owed to others” column is actually showing the ‘imbalances of debt exposure between countries’. On the NYTimes version how this is worked out is explained in the key at the top.

The rework is a far better presentation of the data because it is clearer and less confusing.

On the other hand, I think the original is better storytelling. Consider the title “It’s All Connected” and the subtitle referencing the “web of debt exposure.” The numbered sections walk the reader through a particular interpretation of the data. Thomas’s design choices do not reinforce that narrative, while the NYT original design does.

In my opinion, the two versions complement one another.

I totally agree with Stephen that being a clever storyteller does not equate to good journalism in this case. It seems like the original design was intended specifically to tell an interesting story and NOT “present the facts accurately in a way that readers can understand.”

Well, I would in all honesty be surprised if any visual journalist prefers the bargraph over the storytelling visualization-package. I’ll start asking around, and then you might do the same.

From experience, I would also be surprised to see an academic or business communicator choose anything but the bargraph ;-)

I’ll therefore have to disagree that journalism is just about presenting facts accurately in a way that readers can understand. We need different visualizations for different audiences. And only in very rare instances would I recommend to fill your pages with bargraphs, if you intend to reach a healthy percentage of your readers.

Did you guys really sit down and read the page? I had a wonderful time reading the text and learning from the graphic in a truly mixed experience, that I would never get from any ‘effective presentation’.

Tom,

Very funny. I didn’t get it at first. For those of you who are wondering, Tom is referring to my recent blog about the work that received the Best Paper award for information visualization research this year at VisWeek. Yes, a few “context-preserving visual links” is all the NY Times diagram would need to send readers screaming.

Hi Stephen. How are you? I know you were at Malofiej last year. We even sat at the same table for the final awardshow and had a fine conversation! (Don’t worry – I won’t hold your bad memory or lack of research against you).

On your blog and in your presentations you go in hard against selected pieces of work. Surely you can handle a bit of disagreement, twisting and civil argueing?

And sorry to say, but as long as you find the proposed bargraph far superior to the original visualization in accompanying this story, I’ll maintain, that I have a better understanding of journalistic visualization, than you do.

Of course I’ll be the first to acknowledge that my experience and biggest interest is not in the field of academic visualization. I try not to pose as an expert in fields, where I am not.

Oh – and we all love New York Times, don’t we? That’s part of the reason, why it’s so interesting to discuss the work they produce.

Gert,

I apologize for not recognizing your name. I welcome differences of opinion, but only find them helpful when they are clearly articulated with sound argument backed by evidence.

You wrote to me: “As long as you find the proposed bargraph [sic] far superior to the original visualization…accompanying this story, I’ll maintain that I have a better understanding of journalistic visualization than you do.” What matters is not which one of us has the better understanding. In a public forum such as this blog, what matters is that ideas are expressed in a way that we can learn from them. The three series of related bar graphs that Thomas created tell the story of how these countries compare to one another based on the size of their economy, their debt to GDP ratio, and the amount of debt that they owe to others, and it shows the relationships between borrowers and lenders. It does this in a way that is easy to perceive and comprehend. These same comparisons and relationships are difficult to perceive using the original NY Times diagram. Please explain why you believe the original diagram is superior and base your position on more than just opinion. If you feel that bar graphs should not be used in journalistic infographics, explain why.

Hi again,

I’m again having trouble agreeing with you, Stephen, on a chart comparison. I think I concur with Gert that the NYT version tells a more compelling story, the value of which outweighs any relative improvements the bar chart brings.

First, I realize there’s a lot of prose explaining the NYT article, which seems somewhat decried, but without that I don’t understand the bar chart at all either; at least let’s be honest about the criticisms levied against the NYT version having the same impact on the bar. Let me be precise: “Debt to GDP Ratio” is problematic. The legend in the top of the NYT article may be all that is required to explain it, but it IS required for both charts.

One is tempted to add the numbers in the “How Much Debt…” column and compare it to the “Size of Economy” (GDP) column in the Bar chart, expecting to see the middle number to pop out (Debt to GDP — this makes sense) but of course it doesn’t happen because the words do not adequately describe the numbers’ meaning. For example, the third column is misleading in the bar; it should be the Imbalance of Debt Exposure; it is not how much debt is owed. The legend clears this up nicely.

As for story telling, I agree with Gert. For one thing, this is an Opinion piece (if I read the NYT correctly). Journalistically (?!) I think that would give it some leeway towards story telling if that balance were to be argued. Even if not, though, the improvements in the story told by the NYT article are, in my opinion (which I respect is subjective) worth some relatively minor tradoffs.

For example, using line widths is, visually, less effective than a bar in most cases (although compared to the bars for how much Greece owes to others in the bar chart, I see little difference… the sorting is nice but the bars are too thin for any better a comparison than the line thicknesses are). Again I’m keen to prefer the labelled arrows to the non-labeled bars.

Even if labels were not allowed (per the visualization focus of this blog I’ll briefly defer), the NYT tells some interesting stories. Try, for example to find a loop in the NYT model (where country A is imbalanced to country B is imbalanced to country C is imbalanced back to country A). That was one of the diversions I mentally took while reviewing the NYT article; a near impossibility in the bar, but more importantly something I wouldn’t be drawn to consider.

Some other things… the arrow heads allow us to easily identify that Greece and the US have the two primarily outward facing imbalances, while Japan and France have easily the most inward facing imbalances. This ALMOST appears in the bar (Japan and France have very sparse third columns), but the ratio of in-balances to out-balances is difficult to derive for the other countries.

Also, the color of the lines is valuable beyond the “danger” circles in the bar. This could be fixed in the bar by coloring the third chart by the level of danger and then reorganizing by debt owed FROM rather than debt owed TO. For example, the incoming lines to France are imbalanced by high danger lines… it’s debt imbalance is problematic. Japan’s imbalance is outweighed by the US and Germany, which are low risk — all the high risk lines to Japan are thin. I think this is a fascinating story which is simply not told in the bar chart. Germany and Britain’s inflows bear similar stories.

So I’m happy with the arrows and circles and web-like feel. They evoke more stories and display quantifiable information in a way that I truly think exceeds the aggregate value of the bars, even if the issues with the definitions and legend were fixed.

Chip and Manuel,

You guys are forcing me to review the NY Times’ diagram more closely than my eyes find tolerable, but I’ll give it a shot. When Thomas asked me about the diagram originally, I took a quick look and found my eyes crossing, so I encouraged him to sort through the confusion. What he created as a result drew me into the story in a way that the original node-link diagram never would have.

Before diving into some of the issues that you raise, let me make clear to others who are reading this that Thomas’ visualization is his replacement of the diagram that appeared in the NY Times only, not a replacement for the entire story. Thomas is not arguing that his visualization can stand alone without textual narrative. Words would be used to dispel any confusion that readers might have about terms such as Debt-to-GDP ratio.

It is true that Thomas’ visualization does not represent the web of connections, nor does it try to do this more than minimally. Thomas found the original diagram confusing but considered the information that it contained important, so he decided to redo it to better understand the story of debt between Euro-zone countries and the U.S. He produced a simple visualization that allowed him to view (1) each country’s size in GDP as important context when comparing the countries, (2) each country’s debt to GDP ratio to understand the magnitude of debt in relation to each country’s ability to payoff its debt, and (3) the amount of debt that each country owes to its debtors to compare their relative proportions and to get a sense of the interconnections between countries. He created a visualization that enabled all of this to be done graphically, without having to clutter the display with the many numbers that appear in the original diagram. When he sent his visualization to me, my eyes were immediately drawn to do what they refused to do when I saw the original diagram: they compared the different measures of debt to learn the degree to which these countries are indebted and the amounts that they owe to one another. I came away from this quick and simple review understanding a story that I would have never discovered in the original diagram, because I had no interest in following the tangle of lines, comparing the sizes of circles, and reading tiny numbers spread all around the screen.

By using a node-link diagram, the NY Times version conveys the sense of connectedness, but not the full web of connections that I expected given the tangle of lines. It only represents the imbalances of debt between countries, not the full web of payer and payee connections. A different type of network diagram, such as one that arranges countries in a circle and shows bidirectional debt relationships between them using line with arrows or varying widths would represent the web of connections much better. As it is, with some effort I can distinguish countries that have more arrows pointing to them from other countries than arrows pointing away from them to other countries, which gives me a sense of the relationship of each country’s payer-to-payee balance, which is something that Thomas’ version doesn’t address. This information could be easily added to Thomas’ visualization, however, in the form of a simple series of bars that run to the right or left of zero for the balance of debt owed (positive values) or owed to (negative values) each country. Some of the other revisions to Thomas’ visualization that you have recommended might indeed improve it, enabling it to tell a richer story in a way that all readers could understand.

One of my recurring objections to many infographics is the assumption by the creator that the entire story should be told using a single chart. Attempting to make this work is a fun challenge for an infographic designer, but it often produces a nightmare of confusion for the information consumer. Using this NY Times graphic as an example, readers are required to unravel an intricate web and make comparisons based on 2-D areas, which are difficult to decode, all while their eyes are being assaulted by a tangle of lines and arrows. Thomas attempted to break the story into its parts and then communicate each part in a simple way, and to do so in a way that allowed comparisons between the parts of the story (each column of bars) to see how they relate.

You who spend a lot of time making complex network visualizations forget that most people find them difficult and confusing. Don’t allow your familiarity with them allow you to forget the needs of your audience. Many of you also assume that readers, such as those who read the NY Times, prefer pretty circles and lines to more familiar and perceptually accessible forms of display such as bar graphs. On what evidence do you base this assumption? What readers find visually engaging at first glance is not necessarily what they find most useful when they wish to understand the information.

This is all I can say for now. I’m getting ready to fly to Australia today for two weeks of teaching down under.

Have a nice trip, Stephen, I look forward to your comments when you get a chance.

In the mean time, I didn’t mean to be particularly critical of Thomas’ execution; it is a very good chart for what it reveals… I think the main comments I made were based on my response to:

“I think The New York Times editing staff realized this, because they offer a fairly lengthy breakdown demystifying the visualization.”

And I was arguing that the breakdown probably isn’t much shorter for the bar chart version, so the criticism against the NYT version seemed to be unevenly leveled.

I think it’s important also, when you say “Many of you also assume that readers, such as those who read the NY Times, prefer pretty circles and lines to more familiar and perceptually accessible forms of display such as bar graphs” to not make the opposite assumption:

Thomas’ version may be preferable to policy makers or investment analysts who are interested in the straight numbers comparison; no doubt those people are amongst the NYT’s readership, or to people who prefer quantifiable information and hard numbers to “pretty pictures”; I’d think it’s equally possible that “we who spend a lot of time” “forget that most people find them difficult and confusing”.

Hi again –

You’re correct that I base my preferences on opinion, emotion, gut feeling … That’s probably one of the reasons, why I ended up doing newspapers, while you ended up in business and academia ;-)

I’m not going to explain it more for now, especially as Chip and Manuel already did so well.

Just a note, even if I for a couple of years imposed a ban on bar charts, while I was graphics editor – to force us into experimenting with everything else – I don’t hold the view, that bargraphs should not be used in journalistic graphics. In fact I made a small one just yesterday.

Manuel,

Thanks for adding your perspective to this discussion. As an expert in network visualizations, however, which you certainly are, I wonder to what degree you represent the perspective of most NY Times readers. Not everyone finds network visuzliations as inherently interesting as you do, nor do they find them easy to unravel. I’ve tried to respond to your points by number below and have done so quickly, so forgive me if I’m less articulate or thorough than usual.

1. I didn’t make this comment about pretty circles, etc., in response to anything that you wrote and I do not assume that you fall into the camp that promotes this perspective.

2. I don’t agree that the original network diagram falls within the tolerable limit for most readers of the NY Times. I think it’s possible that, because you live and breathe complex network diagrams, your notion of what’s tolerable to most people is off the mark. I personally found this diagram intolerable, despite my familiarity with them, given how much more accessibly the information could have been displayed.

3. I don’t agree that the NY Times diagram represented the intended story well, nor do I agree that Thomas’ visualization reduced the story in a significant way. Thomas’ version supplements the text more meaningfully and usefully than the original diagram. In the original diagram’s attempt to display the interconnectedness, it compromised the representation of debt values by displaying them in suboptimal ways.

4. If by “scribbled” you mean that the bars and text are small, if you blow it up to the size that is required for the original diagram to be legible, the bars and text are no longer too small. Thomas could have expressed these debts as percentages of the whole owed by each country rather than in dollars using a common quantitative scale, which might have worked better, at least for some purposes. I believe that your example of finding “a loop in the NYT model (where country A is imbalanced to country B is imbalanced to country C is imbalanced back to country A)”, which you enjoyed tracing as a light diversion but makes my head hurt just thinking about it, illustrates the degree to which you are perhaps out of touch with the people who read these articles. You, as someone who takes pleasure in thinking about the nature of networks and tracing the development of network representations throughout history, as you do in your book, are not typical of NY Times readers.

5. The original diagram does not actually show how “the whole is more than a sum of its parts.” Instead, it suggests that there is a complicated set of debt interconnections that few people will take the time to trace. The words that you quote from the story describes this interconnectedness in a way that the diagram fails to do. While reading the story, I found that, after being informed in words that the nature of debt is highly interconnected, I wanted graphics to help me compare the sizes of debt and the amounts that are owed by various countries to others. By focusing on the interconnectedness in his graphic, Bill Marsh created a diagram that could not be used to make these simple comparisons that can be easily made with Thomas’ visualization. Even you, with your expertise in reading network diagrams, could not rely on the original diagram to easily make these comparisons.

Chip,

Are you basically arguing that the interconnectedness of the European debt crisis is BEST visualized by big colorful circles orbiting a dense network of smaller circles intertwined with colorful swirling arrows?

It is important to consider purpose. One of the purposes of a newspaper is to entertain – hence crossword puzzles and Sudoku. The NYT version entertains as well as informs. As such it is appropriate for and popular with those readers with the time, desire and diligence to unravel gratuitous little mysteries. (I’m given to understand that NY city is teeming with such people.)

I know some who buy The Guardian daily for the visualisations and spend their lunch hour staining colourful pages with morsels of tuna fish from sandwiches and drips of coffee as they try to decipher baffling depictions of the Arab Spring, costs of public education, and why England can’t win the World Cup. It leaves me cold.

On the other hand, I find Thomas’s display ordered, coherent and informative. For a citizen merely wishing to be informed is far superior.

I have to say that the broad generalizations and empty assumptions on the reading patterns of millions of NYT readers are not just ineffective, but simply digressional from the central question that’s being asked here.

As stated before, Thomas’ version has its own merits and could certainly be a complementary view of the original diagram, but if the question is: which execution succeeds best at portraying the unfolding network of interdependencies or “web of debt”—this is after all the core of the story—then Thomas’ version fails by comparison. Chip has again explained quite persuasively why that is the case, by exposing a set of relationships only revealed by the original graph. I would even argue that Chip’s example of finding a “loop in the NYT model (where country A is imbalanced to country B is imbalanced to country C is imbalanced back to country A)” is far more than a light diversion, but a critical type of inquiry facilitated by Bill Marsh’s network diagram and impossible to ascertain in Thomas’ subsequent version.

The main problem was the reductionist approach taken by Thomas, who as Stephen explains, “attempted to break the story into its parts and then communicate each part in a simple way”. This methodology is the exact antithesis of any systemic analysis of a network structure, and while arguably able to answer a set of new questions, Thomas’ approach detached itself from the central inquiries driving the story and the original purpose of its accompanying diagram.

Since it’s only from the problem domain (goal) that we can determine which execution is better suited and easier to understand, I’m still left to wonder how one is able to “get a sense of the interconnections between countries” on Thomas’ piece? Bill Marsh’s version does accomplish the original objective with great eloquence and simplicity. That’s not to say there are not alternative versions that could potentially depict this intertwined network of dependencies in a better way, but Thomas’ is simply not one of them.

Chip,

The fact that you can trace informative connections in this network diagram is not the issue. The question is, “Is this static network diagram the most effective way to tell this story to readers of the New York Times?” I believe that it is not. I believe that few readers will take the time to look beyond the tangle of lines. I have no empirical data to back up my intuition, but my intuitions on these matters are based on a great deal of experience.

Stephen, you ask several questions, without taking any time to answer mine, so, before I answer, can you please answer my simple question…

I believe I challenged that:
1. The story of “why is a country in danger” is a key part of the “story”
2. The bar chart does not explain why some countries are in danger and why others are not, while the diagram does — particularly France, but also others (see my previous post)

If the bar has made some parts of the data more accessible (which I don’t necessarily concede anyway) at the sacrifice of this part of the story, then I’m simply arguing that it’s reasonable to believe the sacrifice is too great.

So again: compare the diagram to the bar chart and explain how they tell the story of France: why is it in danger? Am I incorrect in saying that the bar fails to tell that story as well as the diagram?

To quickly address your question, though: Even if some people don’t take the time to digest the diagram, being able to digest the chart more quickly is immaterial if the story isn’t there in the first place.

Stephen,

I do feel Chip and myself have explained quite coherently why we don’t agree with the original premise of this post, and I’m genuinely concerned about the circular nature of this debate and the danger of falling into a continuous reiteration of the same arguments.

Any subjective insight of the type expressed by you or Sally on how millions of NYT readers interpret and unravel the original graph can only be translated as “broad generalizations and empty assumptions”, even if they’re unequivocally based on years of experience. By the same token, I could assertively say that many NYT readers are smart, inquisitive, and prone to the type of exploration exposed by Chip and only afforded by the original diagram. But due to its subjective and unsubstantiated nature, this line of argumentation is merely digressional, and I wouldn’t certainly make it the basis of my reasoning.

You pose this very startling question: “Are network visualizations an effective way to communicate to New York Times’ readers?” Subjective views aside, I see no reason why they shouldn’t, particularly when mapping relational datasets. The New York Times has employed similar methods in the past and has done it again with great eloquence. As stated before, there’s an undeniable readability threshold in many graph visualizations, which is widely acknowledged, but this one in particular (with just 10 nodes) is within a very tolerable limit.

You certainly don’t need to convince anyone here on the importance of understanding the intended audience, its immediate context, and expressed needs. But as previously admitted, in the absence of substantiated data on end users, the only honest way to determine which execution is better suited and easier to understand is by contemplating its original deliberate goal.

[I have to apologize for the blunt reiteration of previous points in the following paragraphs, but they are central to my disagreement]

–

Thomas’ version has its own merits and could certainly be a complementary view of the original diagram, but if the question is: which execution succeeds best at portraying the unfolding network of interdependencies or “web of debt”—this is after all the core of the story—then Thomas’ version fails by comparison. Chip has again explained quite persuasively why that is the case, by exposing a set of relationships only revealed by the original graph. I would even argue that Chip’s example of finding a “loop in the NYT model (where country A is imbalanced to country B is imbalanced to country C is imbalanced back to country A)” is far more than a light diversion, but a critical type of inquiry facilitated by Bill Marsh’s network diagram and impossible to ascertain in Thomas’ subsequent version.

The main problem was the reductionist approach taken by Thomas, who as you explained, “attempted to break the story into its parts and then communicate each part in a simple way”. This methodology is the exact antithesis of any systemic analysis of a network structure, and while arguably able to answer a set of new questions, Thomas’ version detached itself from the central inquiries driving the story and the original purpose of its accompanying diagram.

Bill Marsh’s version does accomplish the original objective with great eloquence and simplicity. That’s not to say there are not alternative versions that could potentially depict this intertwined network of dependencies in a better way, but Thomas’ is simply not one of them.

–

Finally, you make a really good point on the need for interactivity. I have always been an advocate of interactive techniques, not just as a key differentiator of information visualization (we can leave this notion for a separate debate), but also as a vital mechanism in the representation of complex networks. Even though I feel the requirement is not crucial in this particular case, it’s important to highlight (thanks Josh for the tip) that the authors have in fact produced an interactive version of the original diagram, where amongst other things one is able to explore subsets of the network as digestible chunks, while also following a deliberate story line:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/10/23/sunday-review/an-overview-of-the-euro-crisis.html

In light of this, and acknowledging your approving view of interactivity, do you consider this a better version than the original static execution? And more importantly, do you still think Thomas’ piece is superior to both (static and interactive) in representing the unfolding network of interdependencies?