Data Versus Information – Financial Bailout (Part 1 of 2)
The Financial Lobbying information below is a great example of the difference between giving someone data and providing them with information. The designer stopped far too short when putting this matrix together because they left all the work for me to do. If you’re like me and you see this grid, what are first few things you do?
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When I saw this, I immediately did these things:
- Quickly read the title and sub title
- Scanned the companies looking for a familiar one
- Started calculating percentages of each to the total
- Thought about how much these bailouts are of the total bailout package
I am only looking for some basic statistics and context for this data. I need to put it into perspective and try to tell a story. I recreated this data in Excel and added a few simple columns to illustrate my points. Also, we aren’t even talking about charts or graphs, just a simple matrix.
First, I have the same matrix with one additional column for the percent each company is of the total financial bailout spend. Also, you’ll notice I abbreviated the numbers in the millions to save space. Finally, I removed the zebra striping because it really isn’t needed in such a small data set.
In the next example below, I added an additional column that represents the percent each company is of the total bailout package. Now I can see that these eight large financial companies make up 26 percent of the total bailout spend assuming a $700 billion total. What this does, is put the data in some perspective versus just showing a bunch of numbers.
In part 2, I will show you a few more changes that I made to the matrix that speaks to the revenue columns.
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March 19th, 2009 at 6:47 am
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March 20th, 2009 at 10:43 am
Surrounding each number with $, % and/or K clutters the table and makes it more difficult to read the values. Your percent columns are labeled. Why put % after each value? Why not label columns with $ and/or K and let the numerical values stand out?
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March 20th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Naomi – Welcome to Support Analytics and thank you for posting a comment. To be honest, my first thought was to truncate the numbers by using a K instead of all the extra zeros. In part 2 of the series I wanted to go back and reverse that decision because I wasn’t happy with the way it looked. Since it was already done, I chose to not try to undo it. You make excellent points about the other columns that use a % or $ as well.
I agree that a better approach would be to utilize the header of the columns instead of using the signs in the actual data part of the matrix.
Thanks again!
P.S. – Any new books in the works that build on “Creating More Effective Graphs”?
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March 20th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Right now I’m writing an article on Trellis Display for an interdisciplinary
journal “Computational Statistics” by Wiley/Wire. Anyone want to comment on it for me before I submit it?
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April 21st, 2009 at 10:33 am
You have done a number of good things transforming data into useable information!
However, we have two “quantum leap” standards for money above, using (B)illions and K(Thousands). Couldn’t we use millions like $9.7M and $11.4M rather than $9,690K and $11,379K so that you have more of an apples to apples parity when visually comparing the columns? Plus, the precision for the spending on lobbying (to the nearest thousands of dollars) is not relevant when comparing to the rounded bases of multiple billions.
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