Although it's taken me a few days to make this post, I knew what I wanted to talk about as soon as I read the blog question for this week. It's been five years, but I was so struck by the effective use of statistics and visualization that I remembered these maps right away. I'm talking about images produced by Mark Newman in response to U.S. voters who were baffled by the contradiction between the voting outcome maps after the presidential election, and the voting numbers. At the time, many voters who favoured the Republican party claimed that the majority of the U.S. was red on election maps, and that small states had disproportionately large numbers of votes, unfairly swaying the election toward a Democratic outcome. This represents an essentially flawed understanding of the statistics that come out of elections, the set-up of voting regions, and the meaning of the U.S. electoral college. People could have debated for a long time as to why citizens didn't understand the election process or returns, or argued endlessly over numerical data. But in the end, many people simply can't conceive of what numbers mean, and the bias against "word problems" in math shows that turning the statistics into sentences isn't much help. For many people, seeing is believing, and graphical displays of data are what truly bring home the point of a study or article. Newman's illustrations make it incredibly clear why the election gave the result that it did, and why electoral seats are distributed as they are, more easily than pages of explanation could have done. While I've seen many interesting infographics in the years since, that series of maps has stuck with me since 2008.
References
Newman, M. E. J. (2008, November 11). Beyond Red and Blue: 7 Ways to View the Presidential Election Map. Scientific American.
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