{"id":15516,"date":"2017-12-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-04T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/members.dataiq.global\/articles\/information-beautiful-can-it-also-be-bi\/"},"modified":"2024-05-29T13:32:32","modified_gmt":"2024-05-29T12:32:32","slug":"information-beautiful-can-it-also-be-bi","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.dataiq.global\/devstage\/articles\/information-beautiful-can-it-also-be-bi\/","title":{"rendered":"Information is beautiful – but can it also be BI?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week saw the latest set of winners in the Kantar Information is Beautiful awards<\/a>\u00a0announced. Once again, it revealed how incredibly diverse the approaches to data visualisation can be. Gold in the technology, science, medicine or health category went to Kim Albrecht for a study of scientists\u2019 career timelines which looked at when they are most likely to peak. In the sports, games and leisure catgory, the gold winner was an interactive study by Moritz Stefaner and Yuri Vishnevsky on the Rhythm of Food, looking at Google Trends data around searches for food stuffs.<\/p>\n

In between fell everything from mapping the nuclear threat to the unlikely odds of making it big in the music industry. Socially-engaged and gender-focused data work featured strongly in this year\u2019s long-list, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

David McCandless, Awards founder and author of Information is Beautiful, said: \u201cIn this era of \u2018fake news\u2019 and social media overload, data visualisation is one of the most powerful ways to get to the truth behind complex stories. This year\u2019s winners show that data graphics can illuminate complex topics like migration, the gender pay gap and climate change. But are also just as suited to fun topics like the artistry of craft beer, fixing toilets and the Italian surfing scene.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the diversity of the subject matter is striking, two other trends are also visible. The first is that data visualisation is moving out of its historical home of the creative design agency. As McCandless warned: \u201cExperienced data storytellers should watch out though – some of the year\u2019s most brilliant work comes from students.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second trend is the widespread use of big data sources, such as Google Trends or its Quick, Draw! game which won gold for the analysis by Quartz<\/a> of how over 100,000 different people draw a circle. While it is self-evident that large-scale data sets demand creative ways of being made intelligible, there is also an influence working in the opposite direction – creatives are having to adapt to big data and increasingly use conventional tools in their work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is leading to a tension between the historical practitioners of creative-led data visualisation and the new generation. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fact that the community prize, based on votes by visitors to the IIB site, went to the annual report<\/a> of the ERGO Hestia Group, \u201cNetwork”, by Hanna\u00a0Dyrcz. While drawing on data and image analysis as well as coding and graphic design, the output was a classic example of creative print.<\/p>\n

\"ShipMap\"Duncan Clark, founder of Flourish, is only too well-aware of this push-pull effect. A gold winner last year for shipmap.org<\/a>, a one-off project mapping the movements of marine traffic around the globe, he has spent the time since in a transformation into a software business.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere has traditionally been a distinction between the beautiful, one-off, handmade projects and tools that visualise data such as Tableau,\u201d he told DataIQ in an interview during the run up to the awards night. \u201cI set out to make a tool that would allow anybody, regardless of whether they know coding, to create high-end projects rather than being limited to commoditised views.\u201d<\/p>\n

The result is Flourish which two years ago was a two-person design agency that has pivoted to become an eight-person start-up data visualisation developer. To do that, Clark had to stop taking commissions for those one-off projects and start to understand coding. \u201cI downed tools and started building the tool in an incubator, doing a venture capital round to build the team,\u201d he explained. \u201cWhen we started, I was the story teller and we had one coder – now there are seven coders and me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThings are changing at pace. All the nice stuff in data visualisation has been done as one-off projects which are very time-consuming and are not available to most people, but they have elements that are broadly applicable,\u201d he said. His own IIB award-winning work led to a string of requests to produce something similar for other clients which he had to turn down because the data set and code were bespoke and there was no easy way to transfer them into new projects.<\/p>\n

With Flourish, the intention is to allow users to \u201cput data in, change the colours, publish your own views\u201d and perhaps to make it a marketplace for Java script as users share their own outputs with the community.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHundreds of millions of people are using Excel and it seems unfair that they can\u2019t create something beautiful or more advanced to visualise their data without going to an agency and spending tens of thousands of pounds,\u201d said Clark.<\/p>\n

Still in beta, Flourish intends to make itself available for free to newsrooms, reflecting the way in which data journalists have been leading the way for mainstreaming of data visualisations. Clark himself used to be a journalist at The Guardian which has been one of the pioneers in this field.<\/p>\n

It is the visibility of these presentations that has created a climate in which business users want more than simple charts – even the dynamic versions available in business intelligence tools. As this year\u2019s IIB Awards revealed, the gap is closing between the bespoke and the BI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week saw the latest set of winners in the Kantar Information is Beautiful awards\u00a0announced. Once again, it revealed how incredibly diverse the ap…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":15517,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","_searchwp_excluded":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[129,398],"tags":[169,177],"pillar":[],"class_list":["post-15516","article","type-article","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorial","category-public","tag-analytics-and-insight","tag-business-intelligence"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-21 06:47:07","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dataiq.global\/devstage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/15516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dataiq.global\/devstage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dataiq.global\/devstage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dataiq.global\/devstage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dataiq.global\/devstage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dataiq.global\/devstage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/15516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dataiq.global\/devstage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dataiq.global\/devstage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dataiq.global\/devstage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dataiq.global\/devstage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15516"},{"taxonomy":"pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dataiq.global\/devstage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pillar?post=15516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}