The Data + Design was super interesting to read and provided a lot of really valuable information. I wish I found it earlier because I could have applied a lot of the information on data presentation to my assignments for a cartography class I’m taking. For the assignment I linked above I did not collect the data myself so I can’t relate it to the “Collecting Data” section of the online book but I did find the “Visualizing Data” and “What not to do” sections very relevant. The style of the online book has that classic mac sleek look to it. In my experience, a lot of websites or info-graphics that do this often over simplify or misrepresent data. However, I feel like this book did a good job in presenting its information. Due to all the different “chapters”I feel that the information got represented fully.
The methods of data collecting were really well explained in both text and visual format. The importance of accurately presenting information through a visual medium is being ever more important. Because visuals are often widely used and understood it’s important to make sure that they portray the correct information and this is mostly controlled by the presenter. In cartography there are four “quadrants” in the cartographic process but these can be applied to any representation of data. The two quadrants determined by the presenter are pattern-recognition and encoding. In general pattern-recognition is deciding what data to use and encoding is deciding how to represent that data. The viewer’s two quadrants are decoding and spatial cognition. Decoding is how the viewer understands the information presented and spatial cognition is how that information effects their view of the world. Although the spatial cognition quadrant is mostly restricted to cartography, the rest of the quadrants can be easily applied to any sort of data.
In the “Perception Deception” chapter the most relevant section for me in terms of my cartography assignment was the small paragraph about the contrast between level differences. Luckily the map-making tool I was using, Google API uses a color gradient assigned to the data values so that level difference isn’t an issue. However, if you want you, can define colors for specific data values if you want in the Google API code. Because this type of map (a choropleth map) is purely based on the color of an area, as the value of the color is the ‘symbol’, it’s super important that the colors are chosen wisely.