Visualization: Information Overload
Sometimes I can’t tell if technology is ruining my life or becoming my life, or if the two are ultimately inseparable. When I was growing up in Spokane, WA, I’d read the Spokesman Review every Sunday and that was that. Then, in college, I’d go for coffee in the morning and page through national papers left behind by previous patrons.
Now, when I wake up, I turn on NPR, read newsletters from Slate.com and Mediabistro, and then go online to scan The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. And all this happens before breakfast. If information were chlorine-tinted water, I’d consume enough each day to fill swimming pools.
I’m not the only one awash in data. Since most of us are over-stimulated, designers and researchers have come up with visual solutions: they’ve actually made data look like swelling waves and spreading webs.
I particularly like this visualization by Chris Harrison, a die-hard researcher who has mapped the interconnections between Wikipedia pages:
The center node in the above image represents Medicine. The other nodes are pages linked to Medicine, giving a comprehensible picture of how Wikipedia works: closely linked pages clump together in subject-related groups. On his website, Harrison writes, “The mere presence of information isn’t all that interesting; there is no context or relevance to be gleaned. However, the structure of information is revealing about where fields intersect and diverge, and ultimately about how humans organize information.” It’s hard to argue with that, especially when he’s made tracking intersections as easy as connecting the dots.
“If we’re going to live in a world driven by data, the thinking goes, we need a simple means of digesting it all,” wrote Michael Cannell on his fastcompany.com blog. “We are increasingly a visual society, and our understanding of the world is increasingly made possible by this new visual language.”
Harrison and Cannell make good points, but more information is still more information, visual or not. A map of data still has to be understood in terms of the date it represents, which means that you can’t benefit from visualizations unless you are already familiar with their sources. For instance, unless I’d previously spent time on Wikipedia and read the explanation behind his visualization, I wouldn’t have appreciated Harrison’s image. This circularity strikes me as a Catch 22. How can another layer of information simplify anything?
I decided to do an experiment. I’d spend a day visualizing everything I read in hopes of better comprehending my data-laden life. Wordle, a user-friendly word cloud application developed by Jonathan Feinberg, was my tool of choice. Feinberg, who works with IBM Research’s Collaborative User Experience group, created Wordle in his spare time and the tool gives prominence to frequently appearing words in any text. Users feed text or RSS links into windows and Wordle streamlines the content. Since most information I consume is in word form, this struck me as the ideal visualization vehicle.
The Experiment
On June 8, 2009, I woke up at 5:30 and read The New York Times. I was disturbed to learn that journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee had been sentences to 12 years hard labor. I read a few other front page stories about the journalists, and decided to compare news sources in hopes of pinpointing commonalities. I pasted reports from The NY Times, LA Times, and the Washington Post into the Wordle window.
The result wasn’t terribly revealing. Though, if I’d glanced at the above word cloud before reading any of the articles, I would have been introduced to the story’s essentials.
Later, I heard another mention of Obama’s Cairo speech on the radio. I still hadn’t read the speech in full and thought that a word cloud might help me get the gist of it quickly.
The cloud was, of course, vague on the details. Still, I got an important outline. The largest word, “America,” was closely trailed by “world,” which was in turn followed by “Muslim,” and “peace,” “Islam” and “rights” also made decent showings. The word cloud said enough to convince me Obama had made a bold attempt at confronting the gulf between the States and the Middle East.
Around 11 AM, I went back to the Ling and Lee story. I wanted to see what online commenters had to say because they often challenge news reports in unexpected ways. At wallstreetjournal.com, a number of commenters were bullheaded, like the one who said “[Obama] is simply a yellow bellied coward if no action is taken.” But others raised important questions about dictatorship, the differences between North Korea and the Middle East, and the merits of risky journalism. I “wordled” the collective comments, and the resulting word cloud had a more comprehensive, telling span than the Ling and Lee cloud I’d made earlier. Iraq, weapons, borders, bargaining—all these words played key roles, emphasizing the fact that North Korea’s actions have global ramifications.
In the afternoon, I checked in on Tony Award coverage. For fun, I fed Entertainment Weekly’s Tony blog into Wordle and came out with a hodge-podge of titillating adjectives that accurately captured the general silliness of the award ceremony.
In the evening, after I’d read a review of the new Sam Mendes film Away We Go, which promises to be a quirky slacker story, I started thinking about the aesthetic of quirk. Wes Anderson seems to be the king of this filmic trajectory and I wondered why Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, a film that certainly revels in idiosyncrasy, felt so sincere to me. I didn’t see why Wordle couldn’t be used to unpack the meaning of art, and so I pasted the entire Royal Tenenbaums script into the Wordle window. Prominent words included “think,” “cigarette,” “please,” and “love,” and these results reminded me of the film’s banality; while the characters have eccentric mannerisms, their desires and interests are fairly immediate and unspectacular.
Near the end of The Royal Tenenbaums, Raleigh and Richie are sitting in a detective’s office, learning about Margot’s secret past. There’s a lot they don’t know. Margot once married a Rastafarian; she’s had lesbian trysts; she had an affair with a New Guinea warrior; she had an affair with a talk show host; she had an affair with Puerto Rican teenager, with a punk rocker, with an Irishman, with Eli, her childhood-friend-turned-novel-writing-drug-addict. After paging through the thick report, all Raleigh can say is, “She smokes.” “Yes,” the detective answers. The onslaught of new information doesn’t change the fact that Raleigh’s marriage with Margot is on the rocks and that Richie, her brother, is hopelessly in love with her. But knowing Margot’s story certainly gives the two men a fuller understanding of Margot’s complexity.
That’s how I feel: after a day of Wordles, I didn’t necessarily understand the world any better. I just knew more. I was more familiar with the information I consumed because I had looked at it from an additional perspective. Familiarity doesn’t equal understanding, but it’s a step in the right direction. Visualizations shouldn’t be used to cut corners, but they should certainly be used as additional, helpful tools for wading through the torrents of information we confront daily.
>Written by d/visible contributor Catherine Wagley
