Shortly after starting at my last medium size marketing agency job I had the pleasure of hearing Alberto Cairo give a presentation on Infographics. He helped take what then was a passing interest in infographics into a full-blown passion.
After the talk, I immediately bought and read his books The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization and The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication. Both were incredibly well written, profoundly insightful, filled with useful examples and case studies of what to do and what not to do and generally helped instill in me a passion for visualizing data.
My appetite not yet whetted, I then bought and studied the 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 volumes of The Best American Infographics and signed up to mailers like Information is Beautiful and started reading.
Why the fascination? Simply put, infographics and other means for visualizing data are incredibly useful means for organizing and presenting information that otherwise takes many paragraphs or pages.
Well. Better put, they can be.
After all, all Bugatti Chiron’s are cars, but not all cars are Bugatti Chirons.
When it comes to TeleSUR English’s Infographics not only do they lack any Bugattis in the line up of work they’ve produced, but most of their infographics are better classified as jalopies, scrap metal, or cardboard boxes.
Lest it appear that I’m overly harsh, I’ll review a few examples of the many infographics that have major issues in truthfulness and aesthetics.
TeleSUR English Infographic with Incorrect Information
This infographic, a term I clearly use loosely here because it’s really just a visual news release poorly conceived and executed, amuses me for a number of reasons.
I took a screenshot of this “infographic” to point out how several people that viewed it believed it to be the incorrect date listed on there and thus felt that it reduced their credibility as a news organization.
In TeleSUR English’s defense, this is an understandable mistake.
I’ve worked with enough graphic designers from Latin America to know that this is a typical error when producing based on designs for an American audience.
Similar errors include applying metric measurements, using comma’s instead of periods to indicate decimals and writing “Jaja” instead of “Haha”.
What’s makes this doubly funny is that even then, the date is still wrong.
You can check this on Reuters as well as Greg Wilpert’s Venezuela Analysis.
In addition to these issues, you’ll notice after every period in the list that there is a hyphen.
1. –
2.-
3. –
Why? A full stop has been indicated, so there’s no need for a dash. It’s distracting and unnecessary.
In the places where the copy is gramatically correct, which is few and far between, the word choice doesn’t make sense. The writer of the copy clearly had English as a second language, which is fine, but the editor that approved publication should have checked it first.
TeleSUR English Infographic with Incorrect Information Part II
4 +10 +8 +12+ 26 +12+50= 122, not 185.
TeleSUR English’s Infographic is incorrect, though their source – Global Witness – is not only clear that this number is worldwide, but they also present the data in a far superior manner.
Clicking on the link above or exploring the map below demonstrated far superior means for displaying that data that does not lose credibility because they can’t do simple math.
TeleSUR English Infographic with Incorrect Information Part III
Besides the fact that the infographic is ugly – all of those people they show on there provide don’t assist in interpreting or understanding what is being depicted, but hampers quick interpretation. Then there’s the fact that they miscategorize the Massacre at Wounded Kneww as a “mass shooting” instead of an act of genocide. Futhermore, the one percent figure that’s on there, “31% of mass shootings happen in the US” isn’t contextualized. What they should be including is this in relation to the world’s population – which the United States makes up ~5% of.
Oh, and then there’s the fact that their research didn’t include a number of other mass shooting that other news outlets research teams discovered.
TeleSUR English Infographic That Is Ugly and Stupid
I found this particular infographic to be interesting, though not in a good way.
The first thing that stuck out to me on this – besides the garish blue and red color scheme – was the many percentages.
The five-second rule applies both to food that has fallen on the floor as well as to infographics. Perhaps a small percentage of people can determine what 3.7% is of 58 million, but all would agree that it’d be much easier if this particular number was just placed on the infographic.
Seeing the source, however, was the second thing. See that I knew immediately that not only was this infographic ugly, but that it was stupid. How so? Cause Pew Research understands data and how to visualize it.
In the TeleSUR English iteration, the Latinos just drop into the middle of the United States. Why visualize it that way when you can get even more gradient like the above? Whoever researched for this infographic must have seen it to get the data, but apparently didn’t think to mention to anyone at TeleSUR English that there was a better way of showing it there.
Putting aside the fact that on the same page that lists the data used for this infographic and a few others connected to Pew Research’s report, the data exists elsewhere on their site that can break down Regional Dispersion by country.
More than that, the infographic could have contained where Latinx people were and where they were going.
Migration Policy’s South American Immigrants in the United States gives a hint as to how much more useful a well-made infographic can be. Showing migration (new people) instead of (net people) allows them to tell a story about the changing conditions that latinos may be facing.
And let’s face it, these are latino people we are talking about, not latinx. Which is the first thing the people read when looking at the article and is something that a vast majority of people don’t use and is likely to make people want to dismiss it – a feeling compounded by the many percentages discussed earlier.
TeleSUR English Infographic That Is Useless
While I’m focusing on the essential worthlessness of the infographic, I also want to point out that none of the flags on the infographic are correct.
Now when I say that this infographic is useless I mean this in a number of ways.
Additionally worth noting is that ALL of the infographics are not paired with any textual content – be it a news story, opinion article or analysis that TeleSUR English has produced.
What, you may ask could have been shown instead? Excellent question.
If this was connected to some story, for instance comparing the cost of percent THC to price?
But not, that’s not really all that interested either. Here’s some examples of “marijuana infographics”:
Now I have my issues with this infographic too – it needs a source listed; the deaths per substance at the bottom should be a bar chart; the prohibition cost listed covers all of drugs war spending (though for what year I don’t know) rather than just marijuana so that’s not appropriate either.
But even then this is at least giving some useful information besides an appropriate price to pay a drug dealer.
This chart I really love, which really isn’t a surprise because Statista always produces great work.
***
Despite my criticism of the past four years of the infographics that TeleSUR English’s has produced and the people that signed off on it, there may be a change coming soon.
Earlier today, February 22nd, Patricia Villegas tweeted the following.
While I’m glad that Patricia Villegas has begun multimedia journalism workshops for TeleSUR and TeleSUR Englis at their headquarters in Caracas.
Furthermore, I also wonder what’s happening with the content that they produce – is it going to be disseminated solely for the people present there, or are they going to make this useful information available for free somewhere on there website so that anyone from the Global South can download it and learn it?
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see as to their level of adherence to their stated commitment to those in the Global South. After all, not everyone can afford to spend the money on the books that I have in my quest to master the craft of creating quality inforgraphics.