Data Visualization for Human Rights Advocacy
A team from New York University’s schools of Law and Engineering (Katharina Rall, Margaret L. Satterthwaite, Anshul Vikram Pandey, John Emerson, Jeremy Boy, Oded Nov and Enrico Bertini) has published some research into how human rights organisations are adopting data visualisations.
Amid large amounts of anecdotal evidence in this area, the research collects some useful, rigorous findings. Here are three we wanted to highlight:
1. What did they do? Content coding of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch fact-finding reports published in English as PDFs in the years 2006, 2010, and 2014.
The number of visual features included in reports almost tripled between 2006 and 2014, and organisations are using data visualisations in both old and new areas of their work.
However, major human rights organisations were only using data visualizations relatively rarely in comparison with photographs, which were the most common visual features used. [Engine Room note: it would be interesting to see if this trend persists in 2016.]
2. What did they do? An experimental user study on whether data visualisation can make a message more persuasive, comparing viewers’ responses to data presented through bar charts and line charts with their responses to data in tables.
Graphical information can be more persuasive than text...in some situations.
Human rights advocates have an opportunity to “use experimental findings to refine their strategic choices about using different types of charts and tables when targeting communications at different types of audiences.”
"There is a consistent trend that graphical information (data presented through charts) is more persuasive than textual information (data presented through tables) under certain conditions...
"For people who did not have a strong prior opinion on the issue, charts were more persuasive than tables. Tables...seemed to outperform charts when the participants...had a strong initial attitude against the persuasive message." [Statistical significance could only be confirmed for the former of these two findings].
3. What did they do? An experimental user study on how visualisation techniques could mislead users. They chose common distortion techniques—including some that they’d found in human rights from point 1, and presented viewers with deceptive visualisations using synthetic data based on real-life human rights issues.
There’s evidence that data visualisations can and do mislead viewers:
Participants who were presented with a deceptive visualization which intentionally exaggerated the message to be drawn from the data did perceive the underlying message in its exaggerated form at a statistically significant rate.
Similarly, participants who were presented with a visualization that suggested a reversal of the message to be drawn from the underlying data were deceived at a very high rate.