Research Guides : Data Resources and Statistics for Legal Research: Data Visualization

Data Visualizations

FEMA - Data Visualizations
U.S. Census Data Visualization Gallery A weekly exploration of Census data.
NYTimes - Mapping America: Every City, Every Block Browse local data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, based on samples from 2005 to 2009. Because these figures are based on samples, they are subject to a margin of error, particularly in places with a low population, and are best regarded as estimates. (Must download Flash Player)
The Data Visualisation Catalogue Search by function or list.
The Use of Data Visualization in Government

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Through a Glass Darkly: Using Brain Science and Visual Rhetoric to Gain a Professional Perspective on Visual Advocacy Lawyers face new challenges for persuading in a culture where visual imagery predominates, information is instantaneously transmitted and received, and individual attention spans are shrinking to a nano-scale level. Spending hours at a trial listening to oral arguments, observing witness testimony, and viewing documentary exhibits is a daunting task for jurors who are used networking sites, and Twitter. Based on the number of news stories of bored jurors refusing to look away from their blackberries during trials, attorneys might be fighting a losing battle to control the attenuated attention spans of modem jurors. In other words, the traditional method of trying a case-through oral opening and closing statements, witness testimony, and static documentary exhibits-no longer meshes with the way that most people process information in the twenty-first century.
Visual Rhetoric: Topics of Invention and Arrangement and Tropes of Style One picture can replace a thousand words of legal discourse. An attorney or counselor at law can supplement or even replace several pages of narrative or legal reasoning with a graphical visualization of the communication-a photograph, a cartoon, a painting, a model, or another form of visual or graphical rendering and in so doing, improve the document's communicative and persuasive potential. The near instantaneous cognitive and communicative power of visual images makes visual rhetoric a worthy subject of examination in modern rhetoric and legal discourse.

From SSRN

Showing People behind Data: Does Anthropomorphizing Visualizations Elicit More Empathy for Human Rights Data? We investigate the impact of using anthropomorphized data graphics over standard charts on viewers’ empathy for, and prosocial behavior toward suffering populations, in the context of human rights narratives. We present a series of experiments conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk, in which we compare various forms of anthropomorphized data graphics — ranging from a single human figure that ‘fills up’ to show proportional data, to separated groups of individual human beings — with a standard chart baseline. Each experiment uses two carefully crafted human rights data-driven stories to present the graphics. Contrary to our expectations, we consistently find that anthropomorphized data graphics and standard charts have very similar effects on empathy and prosocial behavior.
The Ethics of Visual Legal Rhetoric This Article discusses the application of visual rhetorical techniques in legal writing and the ethical questions that are raised regarding the use of these techniques. It is likely that visual rhetoric will be used in brief writing and general legal communications at an increasing rate because the research and scholarship of a wide range of disciplines — law and popular culture, cognitive studies and brain science, data visualization studies, and modern argument theory in rhetoric — indicate the communicative power of visual techniques. This fact coincides with the development of technology in the production of legal documents, and technology in the reading and reception of legal documents, that allow judges and attorneys to access full-color graphics, imbedded video, and multimedia content, and follow hyperlinks in the normal course of reading legal briefs and memoranda.
How Deceptive are Deceptive Visualizations?: An Empirical Analysis of Common Distortion Techniques In this paper, we present an empirical analysis of deceptive visualizations. We start with an in-depth analysis of what deception means in the context of data visualization, and categorize deceptive visualizations based on the type of deception they lead to. We identify popular distortion techniques and the type of visualizations those distortions can be applied to, and formalize why deception occurs with those distortions. We create four deceptive visualizations using the selected distortion techniques, and run a crowdsourced user study to identify the deceptiveness of those visualizations. We then present the findings of our study and show how deceptive each of these visual distortion techniques are, and for what kind of questions the misinterpretation occurs. We also analyze individual differences among participants and present the effect of some of those variables on participants’ responses. This paper presents a first step in empirically studying deceptive visualizations, and will pave the way for more research in this direction.
The Persuasive Power of Data Visualization Data visualization has been used extensively to inform users. However, little research has been done to examine the effects of data visualization in inﬂuencing users or in making a message more persuasive. In this study, we present experimental research to ﬁll this gap and present an evidence-based analysis of persuasive visualization. We built on persuasion research from psychology and user interfaces literature in order to explore the persuasive effects of visualization. In this experimental study we define the circumstances under which data visualization can make a message more persuasive, propose hypotheses, and perform quantitative and qualitative analyses on studies conducted to test these hypotheses. We compare visual treatments with data presented through barcharts and linecharts on the one hand, treatments with data presented through tables on the other, and then evaluate their persuasiveness. The ﬁndings represent a ﬁrst step in exploring the effectiveness of persuasive visualization.
Visual Rhetoric and Visual Narrativity in Five Sections of a Brief The legal brief of tomorrow will have color, graphics, photographs, imbedded videos, depictions, and diagrammatical elements; it will, in short, be highly visual. The tomorrow I am talking about is the very near future. The confidence with which I bring this prediction is bolstered by the research and scholarship of a wide range of disciplines — law and popular culture, cognitive studies and brain science, data visualization studies, and modern argument theory in rhetoric — and by the development of technology in the production of legal documents, and technology in the reading and reception of legal documents, that converge in one locus: that legal briefs will, and should, become a visual presentation of legal rhetoric and narrativity, and thereby fulfill the professional responsibility of advocates to use the best practices to represent the interests of their clients in law practice.

Snake Oil Supplements

An excellent example of a dynamic visualization from Information is Beautiful by David McCandless. Click the image above for more information.

Data Visualizations in Government
The report presents case studies on how visualization techniques are now being used by two local governments, one state government,and three federal government agencies. Each case study discusses the audience for visualization. Understanding audience is important, as government organizations provide useful visualizations to different audiences, including the media, political oversight organizations, constituents, and internal program teams. To assist in effectively communicating to these audiences, the report details attributes of meaningful visualizations: relevance, meaning, beauty, ease of use, legibility, truthfulness, accuracy, and consistency among them.

Tableau

Tableau
Tableau may be used to make your data more impactful.
Gallery of Greatest Hits

Tableau provides software from which uses can produce highly detailed and interactive visualizations.