James Davenport reviews Visual Strategies: a Practical Guide for Scientists and Engineers by Felice Frankel and Angela DePace
We are living in a golden age for scientific communication, a time of increasing appreciation for all things quantitative, when particle colliders find themselves at the heart of novels and scientists and statisticians can write bestsellers. In this golden age, the likes of Nate Silver, political statistician for the New York Times, and Hans Rosling, a medical doctor, public health statistician and frequent TED speaker, have attained near rock-star status thanks to their heady combination of stunning results and ability to bring mathematics to the public sphere with seemingly effortless grace.
The growing popularity of science, however, has made the effective communication of complex scientific results more important than ever: with a bigger audience comes a bigger responsibility to get things right. The popularity of Silver, Rosling and their intellectual kin has also highlighted the gap between researchers who communicate well, and those who struggle to present their results even to specialist audiences. Visual Strategies is a book that should appeal to people in both categories. Billed as a “practical guide for scientists and engineers”, it lies somewhere between a coffee-table conversation piece and a reference manual for wizened data masters, and its goal is to educate researchers about the foundations of good design, in the hopes of improving the way they communicate about science.
The thing that struck me immediately when I picked up Visual Strategies was that it is unlike any other textbook or reference manual on my shelf. The book’s jacket is covered with a colourful pattern of arrows, and it employs a technique called lenticular printing to make the arrows change from warm red to yellow depending on which way you look at them. The effect is instantly engaging, compelling you to pick up the book and flip through the richly coloured pages.
The authors, Felice Frankel and Angela DePace, have chosen a tabbed layout for the book, reminiscent of a cookbook or children’s story, which not-so-subtly indicates that Visual Strategies is not meant to be read front to back. Instead, its structure encourages nonlinear browsing, and each subsection is colour-coded for quick reference. This is very unusual for a publication aimed at scientists and engineers, since most journals or textbooks are simply black on white, with sparing colour and apparently little thought given to the design of the physical article itself. One of the book’s best features is the “visual index” at the end, which contains small thumbnail versions of the major graphics featured within each section. This is an absolute treat, and in my view it ought to become a standard feature for all textbooks and scientific journals.
Readers who do start from the front of the book will find that it begins with a conversation between the authors (who are both research scientists) and the book’s graphic designer about choices made in construction and layout. This conversation sets the tone for the entire book, which is ultimately about the decisions and changes that go into making scientific figures better and more easily understood by colleagues or members of the public. This same decision-making process carried through to the choices the authors made in creating the book itself. The interior of Visual Strategies is filled with graphs, photos and figures (both hand drawn and computer generated) from a dozen different scientific disciplines, creating an anthology of visual communication. The graphics chosen for Visual Strategies also include many hand-drawn sketches and early rough drafts, which highlight the way some figures were developed and conceptualized. Being able to see these early versions, and the changes made to them, gives readers much to consider in their own visualizations.
The effective communication of complex scientific results is more important than ever now
The book’s visual strategies are presented in two ways: as the authors’ own suggestions for improving various published graphics, or as case studies on the evolution of graphics written by a handful of expert contributors. Differences between the “before” and “after” images are sometimes subtle, and a few may even seem arbitrary. Other changes, however, are dramatic and once shown they seem obvious and almost inevitable. These can sometimes be as simple as adding a bit of colour, or removing labels and lines to declutter the image. The authors note early on that, while you may not agree with a particular change in font or colour, the mere process of considering these factors will improve and enrich your own visualizations, as well as your ability to convey their underlying scientific meaning.
For all the innovation and charming creativity of Visual Strategies, however, its lack of broad structure may limit its utility. The use of coloured tabs, chapter headings and a very dynamic layout is confusing at times, and it lacks a treatment of more traditional graphs, such as scatter plots, bar charts and the growing varieties of density maps. Error bars, plotting symbols and dotted versus dashed lines in plain figures are not always the most thrilling things to discuss, and perhaps they are better left to works such as Edward Tufte’s classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Graphics Press, 1983). Still, because they are the most common forms of data visualization for many researchers, their absence is felt. Along with the many decisions about detail and design that went in to creating the book, the authors also made a conscious choice to aim it at more experienced scientists and researchers. It would be difficult for novices or young students to gain a foundation in data visualization using this text alone.
The book’s supplemental website (http://visual-strategies.org) is full of good-quality content and links, and may yet provide an interesting forum for data-visualization discussions and resources. Anyone interested in visualization should spend at least a little time browsing through it. It is fitting, too, that the book discusses interactive graphics, since researchers can now convey complicated structures or hierarchies within data to anyone with a web browser – making interactivity a hallmark of this new era in science communication.
The tips and discussions throughout this book give scientists a foundation for making their visualizations more honest and more obvious. It lacks the structure needed to be a teaching tool for novices, and is not quite encyclopedic enough to truly be a reference guide for professionals. But Visual Strategies is effective and entertaining at sparking discussion and thought, particularly for those in the trenches of discovery.
- 2012 Yale University Press £25.00/$35.00pb 160pp
