26 August 2005

Map shock

From my friend Cliff Atkinson, presentation expert and author of Beyond Bullet Points:

“Have you ever been so confused by the complexity of a map, chart or diagram, that you didn't know where to begin to make sense of it?

If so, you may be a victim of "map shock" or "visual shock", according to Donald F. Dansereau, Ph.D., of Texas Christian University. Don is Professor of Psychology and Senior Research Scientist in the Institute of Behavioral Research at TCU, and teaches graduate statistics and cognitive psychology.”

Read on in “Map shock.”

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1 comment:

Richard said...

I'm sure this been said elsewhere, but anyone remotely interested in communicating data with graphics, would do well to read Edward Tufte's "Visual Display of Quantitative Information". It goes along way to explaing this "map shock" idea, and provides great principles for the integrity back into data graphics. http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi