Week Eleven - A Five-Minute Analyzing a Graph = A Day Reading A Novel

If informational graphs have never been created, news would have to extend its showing twice the length the usual news time as just the weather forecast reader would take almost half-a-hour perhaps to inform viewers of weather patterns, and that would just for a small country. What I am trying to imply here is that informational graphs help us to reduce our time to analyze what perhaps a very long text and make it easier for us to understand the text.

For example, the graph below shows the time during Napoleon’s march to conquer Moscow:

This graph is hailed as one of the best informational graphs in history, as without confusing the readers, one could ‘read’ it and get the same information as those who have read the text-book on the same event.

                                                           

Another example of informational graph below:

Instead of handing out flyers with texts on it, the advertisers decide to use graphic presentations of what they are trying to say, aided only by short texts. And it is effective – the advert look attractive and would surely interest people to have a look.

And if you start to think that there is no way a scientific graph could look interesting, think again:

What might take a whole text book to explain now only is presented in one easy-to-understand page.

Informational graphs are not only for grown-ups, even children could understand it:

There are a lot more of these kinds of graphs out there and instead of the stereotyping of them trying to make our lives miserable, we have actually taking them for granted, not noticing how much time in our lives have they saved.

References:

§         Lester, P. M. (1995). Informational Graphics (page 187 – 211). California: Wadsworth Publishing.

§         Petterson, R. (1993). Visual Information (2^nd edition) (page 169 – 175). New Jersey: Educational Technology Publications.

§         George-Palilonis, J. (2006). A practical guide to graphics reporting: information graphics for print, web & broadcast. Focal Press. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=9mHSkAxKGfEC&lpg=PP1&dq=informational%20graphics&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q=informational%20graphics&f=false