How humans perceive graphics

05 Sunday Jun 2016

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As I sit at the Hong Kong airport awaiting my flight to Italy, I saw this article on Medium, a popular publishing platform. It’s by a visual journalist at The Washington Post, and it relates to the data visualization work we did this past week:

39 studies about human perception in 30 minutes

Among other things, the article raises a fascinating question: Is data visualization a science or a language — or both? As Kennedy Elliot writes:

I don’t think data visualization or data storytelling is prescriptive; I think there are many options and an infinite number of possible visualizations, many we haven’t even discovered yet.

But perhaps it’s not purely a language either. Obviously there are biases and distortions we bring with us when viewing graphing frameworks and objects, some of which is learned, but some of which seems inherent.

 

 

Data Visualization Tools We learnt on 3rd Day of Jeff’s Workshop

02 Thursday Jun 2016

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Infogr.am

  • Merits:
  1. A fast tool to make an eye-tracking chart, used in American news organizations;
  2. Free themes to choose;
  3. Good color palette;
  4. Interactive charts;
  5. Add title, subtitle, body text and etc.
  • Shortcoming:
  1. Could not adjust size of callout and numbers along the axis;
  2. The callout would not show if the portion of the pie chart is so small;
  3. The map’s color is distributed randomly, not in a pattern.

Silk.co

It is a very good tool with fancy communications between users and the software. You could publish your story online with this tool.

StoryMapJS

It is a very good tool to tell stories with maps and media.

 

Live Streaming: D&N Workshops Day 6, the final encounter

02 Thursday Jun 2016

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Good Thursday morning!

We spent our first two days with Prof. Jeff South of VCU working on data collection and analysis. Can’t believe today is already the last day of the workshop series: We will continue with Jeff on data visualization.

You can tune in to the live stream of our webcast via the following links and enjoy the workshops with us:

2 June Morning
http://chtl01.hkbu.edu.hk/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=694cd1ca-ac56-4d31-85d6-26febd40cc0d

2 June Afternoon
http://chtl01.hkbu.edu.hk/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=bf9ef13b-bc04-4116-b0d1-06977f711de9

Last but not least, Jeff has a fans group in Hong Kong already.

How much do you know about nuclear power in China?

01 Wednesday Jun 2016

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Introduction

Participated in the data-driven news competition in China, we constructed a font-end page using HTML5, CSS3 and javascript: 新能源：核电知识知多少？

We built the page with tiny basic knowledge of “the Big 3” in 5 days, including one day learning from Zhou Yongkang’s case by Caixin.

I would not say it is a news story though “nuclear” is currently a very hot topic around the world, because it is rather a pile of skills／process of fresh learners of “the Big 3” language.

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