Title:	FACE CHARTS: A BETTER METHOD FOR VISUALIZING COMPLICATED DATA
Author(s):	Ray Wyatt
ISBN:	978-972-8924-63-8
Editors:	Yingcai Xiao and Eleonore ten Thij
Year:	2008
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	Data, communication, visualization, face diagrams, face charts.
Type:	Full Paper
First Page:	51
Last Page:	58
Language:	English
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Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	This paper develops earlier work by Chernoff (1973) and others, all of whom used face diagrams to visualize multifaceted data in a fast, holistic and understandable way. Their face diagrams took advantage of humans’ impressive facerecognition and face-interpretation capabilities. As such, face diagrams should be superior communicators of complicated information compared to the more common forms of diagramming. However, it is argued here that face diagrams are frequently misinterpreted due to humankind’s emotional relationship with realistic-looking faces and the consequent cultural, racial, and sex-, age- and emotions-based interpretations of them which inhibit accurate perception of the data’s true relativities. Accordingly, we here develop here a modification of face diagrams, called face charts, which are less reminiscent of actual human faces yet still realistic against those of two traditional diagramming methods – the bar chart and the star plot. Although our sample of test respondents was small it still generated strongly suggestive evidence that using face charts enables respondents to understand ten-dimensional data better than if they were using star plots or bar charts. Understanding is measured here by the speed with which a respondent can both successfully rank the sizes of a randomly chosen variable within four charts and successfully determine which pair of charts is the most “similar”. As such, face charts constitute a very promising data-visualization method for showing the intrinsic nature of multi-dimensional places or entities with speed and accuracy.
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