You said “No more”.

Please – more! This is very useful.

They almost necessarily do lie, albeit often unintentionally.

An unintentional lie, pointed out by Kevin Wellenius:

http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/11/09/where-the-oil-comes-from-not-from-where-i-thought/#comment-125970

I omitted domestic production because the idea was to show imports. So U.S. should have been zero, but Virgin Islands counts as U.S. so its contribution shows up.

Perhaps the title should be Sources by Region, and the data should include U.S. production? In that case, the breakdown would be more like this:

North America 3506109 51.79%
Africa 980231 14.48%
Middle East 837841 12.38%

etc.

The ability to notice and correct these errors is one reason why it’s so important to be able to do the visualization in an observable and interactive environment.

Another reason is the value of the discussions that can ensue.

“In fact, where the US gets its oil is almost completely irrelevant.”

But the fact that many are surprised to learn where it mostly comes from — for now — is not. That misperception should absolutely not be explored in isolation, it should be linked to other relevant data — e.g. reserves vs current imports. Such linkage has emerged from this conversation.

We’ve evolved the Internet into a medium for collaborative production and consumption of text, images, video, and audio. All I’m saying here is that, for the same reasons, we want to evolve it into a medium for collaborative production and consumption of data and its analysis/visualization.

In fact, where the US gets its oil is almost completely irrelevant. The oil market is a world market. The transportation costs are startlingly small but–all things being equal–it’s easier to get oil from countries that are near you (and hard to get it from countries you don’t trade with).

The “dangerous disconnect” between American perception—the US is dependent on Middle Eastern oil—and the reality—we get a lot of our oil from Canada—is actually misunderstanding that is *healthier* than the misunderstanding the chart might lead one to take.

Reading the chart one might imagine that, if the Middle East were plunged into a giant multi-state war, we’d be basically fine. Of course, unless the United States invaded Canada–and Africa, yay!–and commandeered all the oil for US consumption, we’d be in the grip of massive undersupply and a resulting rise in the price of oil.
It’s also worth saying that reserve numbers have all sorts of spin on them…

For those not well versed in maps/geography one of the slickest ways of presenting multivariate data is Chernoff Faces – EVERYONE knows what faces look like. (Google it or take a look at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ChernoffFace.html)

On the other hand, you could just write a list of “top 10 countries with oil reserves”. No visual literacy required for that one, just the most basic numeracy.

That’s something I wonder about a lot. Data shapes in motion may be better than data shapes arrayed as small multiples. But maybe not. I did this experiment after the 2004 election:

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/03.html

See what you think. In retrospect I’m not so sure.

Yes. Practice makes perfect — or anyway, better. We need more opportunities to practice.

We appreciate all the pointers, Tony!

But it’s important to know when which visualization is appropriate. The tools for generating visualizations is increasingly prevalent, easy to use, and powerful: ManyEyes, GeoCommons, Swivel, and languages like Processing. However the importance will be, as it always has, on both exploration as well as proper use of these tools.

However, the right visualizations and analyses, especially when created by experts or amateurs from varied domains, can be incredibly powerful and impacting.

(no more now, I promise)

I think they’re called cartograms, aren’t they?

eg US 2008 election results, by state, according to various functions:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/

I guess you can approximate the effect with a ‘proportional symbol’ map, eg where the size of a circle over each state represents some variable.

Where the colour or shading is a function of the variable of interest, I think the map is a choropleth map?