Understanding Data - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 15

site, you first describe yourself: who you are, where you're from, and what
you're interested in. After you uncomfortably fill out that information, and
perhaps choose not to share a thing or two, you describe what your ideal
mate is like. In the words of DuBois, in the latter, you tell the complete truth,
and in the former, you lie. So when you aggregate people's online dating
profiles, you get some combination of how people see themselves and how
they want to be seen.

In A More Perfect Union , DuBois categorized online dating profiles, digital
encapsulations of hopes and dreams, by postal code, and then looked for the
word that was most unique to each area. Using a tracing of a Rand McNally
map, DuBois replaced each city name with the city's unique word and painted
a different picture of the United States: a more recognizable and personal one.

In Figure 1-10, around southern California, where they make the talkies,
words such as acting , writer, and entertainment appear; on the other hand,
in Washington, DC, shown in Figure 1-11, words like bureaucrat , partisan , and
democratic appear. These mostly pertain to professions, but in some areas the
words describe personal attributes, favorite things, and major events.

In Louisiana, shown in Figure 1-12, Cajun and curvy pop out at you, as does
crawfish, , bourbon , and gumbo , but in New Orleans, the most unique word is
f flood, , a reflection of the effects of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

People are defined by common demographic data such as race, age, and
gender, but they also identify themselves with what they like to do in their
spare time, what has happened to them, and who they hang around with. The
great thing about A More Perfect Union is that you can see that in the data on
a countrywide scale.

The same sentiment—where data points are recollections and reports are
portraits and diaries—is seen in Felton's reports, Clark's atlas, and Parecki's GPS
traces. Statisticians and developers call this analysis. Artists and designers call
this storytelling. For extracting information from data, though—to understand
what's in the numbers—analysis and storytelling are one and the same.

FIGURE 1-9 (following page)
Selected pages from 2010 Annual
Report by Nicholas Felton,
http://feltron.com

Just like what it represents, data can be complex with variability and uncer-
tainty, but consider it all in the right context, and it starts to make sense.