Kami

Project

Alternate link here if the image below doesn't work

Tools used: Google Spreadsheet, Adobe Photoshop

Proposal

I will be using art market statistics (from here and here) to show the current state of art auctions in terms of what items are of recent interest, what they are selling for, which auction houses are selling these profitable works, and the type of work (medium, time period, artist's nationality - I haven't made a final decision on this yet.)

My mother is an artist and I majored in art history as an undergrad - I closely followed art sales through Christie's and Sotheby's during this time and it is still of interest to me. Since I have no idea whether I will have internet access over break, I will be working on this independently thus all duties go to me.

In my planning stage, I'm thinking that my deliverable will be a static infographic, though I may look into interactive software such as StatSilk and do some fiddling with Tableau.

Reviewer 1 - Si Eun Kim

One of the interface design principles is that if the interface is visually pleasing, people tend to perceive the interface is easy to use. I think this principle applies to Kami’s visualization as well. Although this is a visualization, not an interface, her visualization is visually pleasing and it looks easy to interpret data to me.

From the CUT-DDV perspective, I think the context is art sector (art auction), users are those who want to know the trend in art auction or art in general, and task is to catch important pieces of art work sold in 2010. Data is multi dimensional; temporal (artist timeline), continuous(price), nominal(artist names), spatial(artist home country), etc. Display is either a website or a magazine. Visualization technique is charts, graphs, and maps using Photoshop.

One of many reasons why I like this visualization is that this visualization is well made to be viewed at a glance. All charts and graphs are put together nicely, so it is convenient to move from one chart to another. Viewers can skim through the various visualizations, and select which visualization to see more carefully.

I also liked the visualization’s delivering a message. “Of the 100 most profitable works, 99% were created by MEN” delivers her message very well, and it clearly tells viewers that there is an imbalance of gender ratio.

P.S_ I found a typo; it is “country”, not “county” in “Profit, by artist home county” map visualization.

Reviewer 2 - Yu-Hsuan Chang

First of all, I like your multi-viewpoints and the design you present them, because they successfully enrich your topic and make it a vivid and interesting visualization! Some details draw my attention as well. For example, in “5 most profitable artists”, each your squares means $10 million, and you list 10 squares in one row. It makes reader easy to count and compare. Also the bar chart shows the artists’ distribution on timeline, and it’s another interesting story, too. The only thing I concern is too many stories are gathered so crowd. I was thinking that arranging some lines or colored regions to separate them, but later I worried that might ruin the neatness ans clarity in this visualization. So maybe keeping the left column but making the right broader column with one story in each row could simplify it.

Reviewer 3 - Dr H

Wonderfully, visually appealing. Gorgeous use of the paintings. Particularly nice is how you fit them all together, many individual stories fit onto a rectangular frame like a collage. This is clearly "presented" material, as opposed to an exploratory interface. My main comment would be to think about how this might be interactive. For instance if each picture's elements were linked, so that clicking on a picture in the timeline would take you to that picture's information, etc. Of the visualizations you have some are just telling stories (99% male), who the auction houses are, etc. The others are glimspes into timelines (of works created, or lifespans of creators), and locations (where work was created). so one visualization might be to show a timeline (perhaps horizontal and scrollable) which is stacked bar chart showing numbers, but also showing (some) works (like your vertical bar). And a map interface like you have. But then make them both interactive. so if you click on author in timeline it brings up their bio, and shows their works (display pane?). If you click on painting it brings up the creator and their lifespan, and other works. if you click on an auction house it shows painters sold, works sold. You could use brushing to highlight information in the other visualizations when something is selected. I.e. painting creation site on map highlighted when that painting is highlighted.

Reviewer 4- Joseph Whaley

I like how your visualization is set up in a layout similar to an infographic. It displays many types of information in a creative way which allows the viewer to explore the visualization. I like how all the art is incorporated into your design. This allows the people viewing it to create a stronger connection in their minds between the painting/artist and the corresponding data values.

I’m not sure how useful the “99% Men” donut chart is. It is good at showing effect/being dramatic with the representation, but I think showing a big “1% Women” might be a better choice so that the emphasis stays on the “1%”.

The green $10 million blocks at the top were alright, but required a little bit too much analysis from the viewer in order to compare the values and to see each value individually. A dollar amount listed under the artist’s name would show the exact value and would prevent people from having to count the squares. There also seems to be too many squares to easily count. Using a higher dollar amount for each square is one option to reduce the number of squares needed.

The anecdote about the unknown dates of birth and death for two of the artists could go in the white space of the graph to prevent the text from taking up unnecessary space and interfering with the title below it.

Individual values seem to get lost in the graphs for “Number of works sold by decade”, “Profit, by artist home country”, and “Number of works sold, by artist home country”. This is fine if you want the data to be represented at a high level without details that can make the graphs messy and busy. Any level of interactivity with the visualization could allow details-on-demand to be available. This could be through a mouse-over or through zoom (similar to a Prezi presentation).

I think the “Works sold, by auction house donut chart at the bottom right isn’t very clear and effective. It is very hard to distinguish the size of the pieces which makes it hard to compare them. A stacked bar chart might be a better choice. One idea I was thinking of would be a stacked bar chart that is stretched horizontally. It would appear more like a large rectangle which could represent the shape of a painting. The stacked bars would be vertically stacked rectangles. And the problem with representing the many different auction houses in the “Other” category could be solved by putting a tree map within the big yellow rectangle for “Other”. This is just an idea and I’m not sure how the sizes of the small rectangles in the tree map would work out.