Lance Stokes

Good Viz:

This visualization appeared in Sunday's NY Times. I think it's a great viz in that it tells a story that cannot be communicated in words. I like that the colors, red and blue, are associated with the party of the president who appointed each justice, and Scalia's data is in bold so it is more prominent. Visually, there are lots of thin lines that make the viz appear rather busy, but we're able to quickly discern the beginning and end of each justice's term on the court over the continuous variable of time on the x axis. The inclusion of the "median justice" line in black on the chart provides an interesting benchmark.

Bad Viz:

I found this viz while thumbing through Tufte's book "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information". He calls it "the worst graphic ever to find it's way into print", which has got to be saying a lot. First off, there doesn't seem to be any reason for the 3-D effect. Second, the colors are unnecessarily bold and not related in any way to the subject matter. Finally,the top chart, in yellow and green is absolutely baffling. I can't understand why it is upside down and not on the same x axis as the read and blue chart. It seems as though a simple line chart would be MUCH clearer and parsimonious.

This viz of "Afghanistan Stability" reminds me of the partisan flow chart of Obama's healthcare plan. However, it is not clear whether this graph is intended to be polemical or not. In the likely scenario where this viz is an honest attempt to provide a helpful aid to understand a situation, it fails miserably. On first, second and third glance, it is so daunting to the eye such that any pre-attentive reaction is aversion. The variety of font sizes make thing very difficult to glean any information at all, and there's no chance of unravelling the knot of lines connecting various elements. In my opinion, the designer overreached and attempted to put too much information on one graph. I'm not sure how I would improve on the job myself, but as it is it really doesn't communicate anything.

Botanical Tree

There are definite pluses to this tree model. It is an interesting way to think about file structure, and I like the 3D effect and it's interactivity feature so that the user could get a full visualization of the file structure. But, in evaluating this viz, I keep coming back to the user. Possibly a given user would find this helpful, especially the feature that allows an immediate identification that a node contains one or many files. But if experienced users understand file structure well so as to use the system, would the elaborate viz seem mostly decorative and maybe a little silly. For me, I think I can navigate the traditional structure well enough to find a file faster without this viz., especially with a robust search engine, which are now commonplace.

But I wonder if this viz would simply be useful in helping the user to evaluate the comparative size of files on the system. I'd like to have a live trial to know. But given that the viz is interactive, would the file closest to the viewer, as you move through the tree appear to be the largest regardless of the comparative file size? If you hold your thumb a inch from your eye, it appears to be huge. It's only at a greater distance, and the added spatial perspective, that comparisons become more accurate.

Another consideration: as I understand it, I can't, at this point, actually access files from the tree viz. itself. This seems to be an overarching drawback. It seems like a given user would not, ultimately, want to use the viz if he/she were going to have to use the old, traditional file structure model to access the desired file.

I have neither given nor received aid while working on this assignment. I have completed the graded portion BEFORE looking at anyone else's work on this assignment. Signed-Lance Stokes