Telling the Story

Telling the Olympic Story

A recent article in the NY Times "Paying for the Olympics: The Toughest Course" displays both the revenue and expenses of the governing International Olympic Committee and the U.S. Olympic Committee (which receives funding from the IOC) in an impressive graphic.   

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/07/business/07metricsg.html?scp=2&sq=metrics%20olympics&st=cse. 

 

NYT Olympic Metric

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The graphic is well done, and does a good job telling the story.  It's  visually appealing and reminded me of this graphic made famous by Edward Tufte, a world-recognized expert on information display and author of the groundbreaking 1983 book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. 

 

But, Tufte is an artist. He approaches charts from an aesthetic point of view. His charts are beautiful, but are they practical in today's fast-paced, data-driven world?

This 100% stacked bar chart, created using Mekko Graphics software, captures much of the key data and can be developed very quickly. 

 

Olympic Metrics

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In the end, information visualization is about finding useful, actionable visual patterns in the data and make them stand out. Our Mekko Graphics chart won't win any awards for aesthetics, but it does the job, and it does it with a minimal investment of time and effort.

A Graphic Look at the Financial Crisis

Today, we have a guest writer, David Goldstein, Ph.D., Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Knowledge Management Associates, LLC. Thanks for this great post David!

The New York Times developed a great interactive graph (How the Giants of Finance Shrank, Then Grew, Under the Financial Crisis) that shows how the financial services market, and its major players, shrank and then grew over the past year.  The numbers are pretty scary, with the top players shrinking from $1.86 trillion in market cap on 10/9/08 at the peak, to $284 billion on 3/9/09 at the trough, and then back up to $947 billion on 9/11/09.

I took the data from the interactive graph and created a simpler chart that tells most of the story in an easier to digest manner.  I used a stacked bar to show how each of the six largest players shrank and then grew.  For some, especially, AIG, the change in both directions was dramatic.  Goldman Sachs, however, came through this relatively unscathed.

I used data rows to put the chart data in perspective.  They show how much the financial services sector changed in total market cap and as a percentage of the total stock market value.

  

The Fall And Rise Of Financial Services

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