OK, A student called my bluff…
Tufte points out that the charts were faxed ahead of the teleconference where the decision to launch was made.
Does this change anything in terms of the points I wanted to make?
In fact, I got a lot of other details of the story wrong. I was remembering details from a podcast I listened to almost 3 years ago (I was driving through the Burgandy region of France returning from a trip – that I remember clearly). Fortunately, the podcast (and the transcript) are still there (links below since WordPress turns them into fancy things).
But… No, these details don’t change the message of my story in class:
- The problem with a historical argument is we don’t know what other factors would or wouldn’t have made the difference (to use another example from class: my grant may have been funded even if I didn’t have the infographic, in fact, maybe the reviewers would have liked the proposal better!). For the Challenger, this is a big deal because…
- Problems in the decision reasoning process can drown out good work in the data analysis and presentation parts. I think this is the real Challenger story.
- Tufte’s example is good for showing certain aspects of visualization design (i.e., rockets are not as effective for making the point as scattered points)
- Even his good example (the scatterplot) falls prey to some “reasoning with data” flaws (pattern finding in small data, handling outliers, significance of correlations in the small, correlation vs. causality, …)
This is actually really relevant to tomorrow’s discussion on critique.
I am critiquing the visualization. I am using these two visualizations as a tool to understand visualization, and am evaluating them. I do need to know the context (what were the goals, who was the audience, etc.) in order to critique well. My job is not to critique the decision making process (although, arguably, that was Tufte’s job on the Presidential Commission). I can speculate about how a more effective visualization may or may not have helped, but with a historical example it’s hard since there are other factors involved.