Fall 20 Data Visualizations and Narratives

WHAT IS AN INFOGRAPHIC?

Infographics are an amazing way of being able to visualize and communicate information to people in a couple of fun images and visuals. They are great marketing tools and they will take the attention of your audience much quicker than a simple power point. With an infographic comes pictures, graphs, data-based visualizations and a very minimal amount of text that sums up the point you are trying to get across. It is also very important to know and to be as clear as possible so that your audience can understand what you are trying to show them.

SHOW MORE, TELL LESS

I think that it is best to show your audience your information instead of telling them. In other words, put in a data-based visual like a graph or a pie chart and show them how the numbers corelate with your given topic. Amy Balliet suggested in Smashing magazine, “Every once in a while, turn off the text layer and see whether the infographic still makes sense. If there isn’t any data viz, or if a bunch of pictures are missing context, then you are doing too much telling and not enough showing.” If you are able to remove a piece of text from your infographic, and your visuals make sense on their own you are on the path of having an effective end product. 

THE PRESENTATION OF YOUR INFOGRAPHIC

From viewing many different kinds of infographics most of them are created vertically rather than horizontally. With that downward-like layout, you should have clear transitions. Having good transitions both on your infographic as well as when you are presenting gives your audience a brief moment to let them know that you are going on to something else. Good transitions in your presentations also help your audience see the connection and relationship between one idea to the next. 

Reference: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/the-dos-and-donts-of-infographic-design/

Beginning, I was confused about benchmark and benchmarking. I read concept of benchmarking in a lot of different field.

• In economic field: Key Performance Indicator ( KPI) such as GDP and economic indexes.
• In business field: Key Success Factors ( KSFS)
• In tax field: benchmarking can understood as using effective tax rate and deferred tax account to gain the objective in tax strategy and planning.
• In society: benchmarking as actions to achieve a desired society with specific measurements.
• In math: benchmarking is also adopt such as statistics
• In technology, benchmarking is a method for comparing a performance of an organization with best practice and tech application of others
• https://www.urenio.org/newventuretools/cba/methodology1.html#:~:text=Technology%20Benchmarking%20is%20a%20method,with%20that%20of%20others%20analysed.

I choose this website to introduce with you that relate to technology field.

However, I see the difference of benchmark and benchmarking

“Benchmarks are reference points or measurements used for comparison, usually with the connotation that the benchmark is a ‘good’ standard against which comparison can be made. Benchmarking is a process of finding good practice and of learning from others”

https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/benchmarking/what-is-benchmarking#:~:text=Benchmarks%20and%20benchmarking%3A%20definitions&text=Benchmarks%20are%20reference%20points%20or,and%20of%20learning%20from%20others

From what I understand from the textbook, benchmarks look at a actual data, and compare them to a target data. The target data does not need to be actualised necessarily. It canbe theoretical. In this case, the best example of this to me are the cases of Covid-19, theoretical impact versus the actual impact.

Notice how the cases in India are compared to possible cases that may occur depending on the responses.

Also the big concept thrown around at the start of the virus’ spread was the “flatten the curve” rhetoric. This lead to many cases of comparing ideal scenarios to the actual cases and data that were being collected.