![]() ![]() Prettiness is a bonus if it obliterates the ability to read the story of the visualization, it’s not worth adding some wild new visualization style or strange interface. ![]() At The New York Times, we strongly believe that visualization is reporting, with many of the same elements that would make a traditional story effective: a narrative that pares away extraneous information to find a story in the data context to help the reader understand the basics of the subject interviewing the data to find its flaws and be sure of our conclusions. ![]() So what’s so wrong with word clouds, anyway? To understand that, it helps to understand the principles we strive for in data journalism. More recently, a site named Wordle has made it radically simpler to generate such word clouds, ensuring their accelerated use as filler visualization, much to my personal pain. This technique first originated online in the 1990s as tag clouds (famously described as “ the mullets of the Internet“), which were used to display the popularity of keywords in bookmarks. A word cloud represents word usage in a document by resizing individual words in said document proportionally to how frequently they are used, and then jumbling them into some vaguely artistic arrangement. If you are fortunate enough to have no idea what a word cloud is, here is some background. Even the logos on clothing were enough to make her skin crawl, but her worst reactions were triggered by the Michelin Tire mascot, Bibendum.Īlthough it’s mildly satirical, I can relate to this condition, since I have a similar visceral reaction to word clouds, especially those produced as data visualization for stories. In his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, William Gibson created a character named Cayce Pollard with an unusual psychosomatic affliction: She was allergic to brands. ![]()
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