Hey all!
Hope you have had a wonderful weekend and enjoyed the sunshine. Today I'm going to talk about good and bad visualizations for data and information. Last quarter, I wrote my a research paper on colony collapse disorder of honeybees in America. The two following visuals both are related to this topic. One is a from a scholarly article and the other from an environmental blog specifically focused on honeybees.
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Higes, M.
et al. (2008). Figure 1. Clinical monitoring of N. ceranae
natural infection.
Retrieved April, 2014 from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1462-2920.2008.01687.x/full
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Visual from blog
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Syngenta. (2013). What is harming the bees? Retrieved April, 2013 from http://www.syngenta.com/eame/plightofthebees/en/blog/Pages/080213.aspx
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The images might be sort of small, so feel free to click on the links to see them up close!
Now let's break down these visuals. The first one from the scholarly article is complex, to say the least. Context is needed to understand what exactly it is showing. The use of colors and arrows helps, but the average person would need to know a lot more about the decline of honeybees before they could understand this visual. For example, not many probably know that N. ceranae is a small parasite. There is a lot of scientific terminology in the visual that make it hard to comprehend completely. To understand this visual, you would have to read most of the article it accompanies. It basically shows how deadly the parasite, N. ceranae, is to honeybee colonies, but that might not be easy to understand just looking at it for a minute. Although this visual presents important, accurate, and reliable information, it does not present this information in an easy-to-understand way. I think the author(s) created and chose this visual to present their data because their audience is not the average person. This is a scholarly article intended for an audience of scientists.
The second one, although it does not present a lot of information, does present data in an easily comprehendible way. This visual informs the viewer what is depicted in a little paragraph above the map. Because the blog is mainly focused on Europe and honeybee issues, there is a greater emphasis on the European countries. The information presented is clear and even has a little legend to help the viewer understand every bit of the information. The colors and format work well. One critique I do have of this visual, however, is that it does not give a list of sources for its information. It just simply sites Syngenta as the source, which is not reliable enough. The author of this article probably chose this visual because the audience for this blog is the average person who may not have a great scientific background. The purpose of this visual is to demonstrate how important and terrible the Varroa parasite and the pesticide neonicotinoids are. And unlike the visual from the scholarly article, it gives a definition for more scientific terms.
Both have some drawbacks, but as far as aesthetics and comprehensibility go, I would choose the visual from the blog as the better one.
What do you think?
-The Green Sasquatch
P.S. Click here to see a super cool info graphic about honeybees. It's quite popular, and thus I don't know how accurate it is, but the design is awesome! This website features other cool info graphics.
Now let's break down these visuals. The first one from the scholarly article is complex, to say the least. Context is needed to understand what exactly it is showing. The use of colors and arrows helps, but the average person would need to know a lot more about the decline of honeybees before they could understand this visual. For example, not many probably know that N. ceranae is a small parasite. There is a lot of scientific terminology in the visual that make it hard to comprehend completely. To understand this visual, you would have to read most of the article it accompanies. It basically shows how deadly the parasite, N. ceranae, is to honeybee colonies, but that might not be easy to understand just looking at it for a minute. Although this visual presents important, accurate, and reliable information, it does not present this information in an easy-to-understand way. I think the author(s) created and chose this visual to present their data because their audience is not the average person. This is a scholarly article intended for an audience of scientists.
The second one, although it does not present a lot of information, does present data in an easily comprehendible way. This visual informs the viewer what is depicted in a little paragraph above the map. Because the blog is mainly focused on Europe and honeybee issues, there is a greater emphasis on the European countries. The information presented is clear and even has a little legend to help the viewer understand every bit of the information. The colors and format work well. One critique I do have of this visual, however, is that it does not give a list of sources for its information. It just simply sites Syngenta as the source, which is not reliable enough. The author of this article probably chose this visual because the audience for this blog is the average person who may not have a great scientific background. The purpose of this visual is to demonstrate how important and terrible the Varroa parasite and the pesticide neonicotinoids are. And unlike the visual from the scholarly article, it gives a definition for more scientific terms.
Both have some drawbacks, but as far as aesthetics and comprehensibility go, I would choose the visual from the blog as the better one.
What do you think?
-The Green Sasquatch
P.S. Click here to see a super cool info graphic about honeybees. It's quite popular, and thus I don't know how accurate it is, but the design is awesome! This website features other cool info graphics.
I think the blog's graphic would be easier for the public to understand, but I must sympathize with the scholarly article's visualization because I am a fool for charts and graphs! Both graphics display some vital information on the topic of honeybees, but for me, I prefer the scholarly article's approach to displaying this information. Knowing that the blog's graphic has no cited sources makes me wonder why it doesn't, which reduces the credibility of the graphic. While it is not cited, it is very clear and easy to look at. I think both of the graphics are pretty solid but I would have to choose the charts and graphs as my preference. I enjoyed reading your post and I look forward to reading more of your posts in the future!
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