Beautiful and informative data presentation

Clear, informative presentation of data can be beautiful.

My previous post, showed a wonderful map that Ian York of Mystery Rays from Outer Space posted. A friend (thanks, Paul!) tweeted me a link to a David McCandless’ website and book featuring excellent data presentation.

Imaginative, elegant presentation can convey the message of the data visually in an easy-to-grasp and sometimes evocative way.

Taken together with sidebar science, and perhaps extended with a personal narrative, these types of presentations can make for powerful presentations.

Below is an older and very well-known example: Charles Minard’s famous chart, drawn in 1869, showing the losses in men, the army’s movements, and the temperature during Napoleon’s 1812 Russian campaign.

(Full-sized original at wikipedia)

Here’s just one example of many from David’s website (see also his Flickr® page) showing comparisons of lifetime deaths per 10,000 users, press reports and the percentage of deaths reported related to the Nutt saga that I have written about (please let me know if you can’t read this, I’ve tried to fit it into the fixed-width the website design allocates):

(Full-sized original on David’s Flickr® site.)

I recommend going over and visiting David’s sites and browsing. There’s plenty of interesting stats and presentations there to keep you busy for a while.