To put this into perspective…
An ongoing collection of visualizations that put numbers into humanly understandable terms. Sorted by topic.
“To people whose minds go blank when they hear something ending in ›illion‹, all big numbers are the same, so that exponential explosions make no difference. Such an inability to relate to large numbers is clearly bad for society. It leads people to ignore big issues on the grounds that they are incomprehensible.”
–Douglas Hofstadter, On number numbness, 1982
Large numbers of all types rule our lives. From trillions of debt to millions of views and hundreds of lightyears. And although these numbers have a direct impact on our day-to-day life, the sad truth is that measures outside our immediate personal experience have little to no meaning to us.
About three years ago I started to acknowledge my own “number numbness” when it comes to monetary values. I just couldn’t wrap my head around all those millions and billions. As an Information Design student, I started to wonder if there was a visual way to put those large numbers into perspective. So I started to research.
This research eventually led to my Master’s thesis “The World’s Wealth in Pizza: Improving the comprehension of large numbers through Information Visualization” (To understand the title, read Tim Urban’s What Could You Buy With $241 Trillion?). Along the way I collected not only many research papers on the topic, but also a sizeable corpus of interesting (and sometimes weird) visualization examples.
After my graduation, this collection remained forgotten in the depths of my thesis folders for two years. It wasn’t until the amazing What Bloomberg’s $11 million Super Bowl ad would cost you on your budget popped up in my Twitter feed, that I decided to stop binging K-drama for an evening and put together this Medium article to share with the world. As with my thesis, I want this list to be a source of inspiration for designers who want to create visualizations that put things into human perspective. Enjoy!
Money
A lot of debt and billionaires here.
“What Bloomberg’s $11 million Super Bowl ad would cost you on your budget”, Washington Post — https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/politics/wealth-comparison/
“Jeff Bezos net worth represented visually by rice.”, Humphrey Yang, https://twitter.com/Humphreytalks/status/1233184797507256320?s=20
“Spend Bill Gate’s Money”, Neal Agarwal — https://neal.fun/spend/
“Printing Money”, Neal Agarwal — https://neal.fun/printing-money/
“Bloomberg Billionaires Index”, Bloomberg — https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/jeffrey-p-bezos/
“Can You Live on the Minimum Wage?”, The New York Times — https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/02/09/opinion/minimum-wage.html
“How many months it takes an average worker to earn what the CEO makes in an hour”, Quartz — https://qz.com/156522/how-many-months-it-takes-an-average-worker-to-earn-what-the-ceo-makes-in-an-hour/”
“Costs Of War”, CostsofWar — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWPPuRjx6j5qhTzB6sRVD1A
“Every pixel is a million dollars”, Alec Perkins — https://alecperkins.net/2017-every-pixel-is-a-million-dollars/
“How much money does Bill Gates have?”, Brain Food — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHGpxHAgy1g
“Obama Budget Cuts Visualization”, 10000Pennies — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt8hTayupE
“What Could You Buy With $241 Trillion?”, Tim Urban — https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/03/combined-wealth-world.html
“One 9/11 Tally: $3.3 Trillion”, The Ney York Times — https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/09/08/us/sept-11-reckoning/cost-graphic.html
“Cum-Ex Scandal: The Multibillion Euro Theft”, Zeit Online — https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2017-06/cum-ex-scandal-tax-evasion-dividend-stripping-germany
“The U.S. foreign aid budget, visualized”, The Washington Post — https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/which-countries-get-the-most-foreign-aid/
“Trump’s defense spending increase isn’t extraordinary, but its impact could be”, The Washington Post — https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-presidential-budget-2018/?tid=graphics-story
“US Debt Visualized in $100 Bills”, demonocracy.info — http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/us_debt/us_debt.html
“Money: A chart of almost all of it, where it is, and what it can do”, xkcd — https://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-1864&y=-452&z=5
“What a billion dollar buys you”, Forbes — https://www.forbes.com/special-report/2013/what-a-billion-dollars-buys-you.html
“The Surplus and The Debt”, Nigel Holmes — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC24h5OcJfA
Humans
“More than 4 million Americans don’t have anyone to vote for them in Congress”, The Washington Post — https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/national/fair-representation/?utm_ term=.53e0f26e510e
“Gun deaths in America”, FiveThirtyEight — https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/
“7 billion world”, Worldometers — https://www.7billionworld.com/about.php
“Waste of space”, City of Münster — https://www.stadtwerke-muenster.de/blog/verkehr/das-wohl-bekannteste-muenster-foto-der-welt/
“Mass Exodus: The scale of the Rohingya crisis”, Reuters — http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/MYANMAR-ROHINGYA/010050XD232/index.html
Paper Clips (2004), Elliot Berlin, Joe Fab, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0380615/
“COVID-19 Impfdashboard”, https://impfdashboard.de/
“How 425,000 Coronavirus Deaths Added Up”, NYTimes — https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/27/us/us-coronavirus-deaths-rate.html
Size, weight, distance, time
Everything from hurricanes to ancient history.
“The powers of ten”, Eames Office — https://www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/powers-of-ten/
“Measuring Things With Ships (Again)”, JF Ptak Science Books — https://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2016/03/measuring-things-with-ships.html
“lightyear.fm”, Mike Lacher, Mika Chernov, Brian Moore, Chris Baker — http://www.lightyear.fm/
“If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel”, Josh Worth — http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
“MapTime”, University of Southampton — http://maptime.co.uk/pages/view/index.php
“Life stats”, Neal Agarwal— https://neal.fun/life-stats/
“Every second”, Neal Agarwal — https://everysecond.io/
“Hurricane Map”, Neal Agarwal — https://web.archive.org/web/20180130231708/http://neal.fun/hurricane-map/
“How the Laos dam disaster unfolded”, Reuters — https://graphics.reuters.com/LAOS-ACCIDENT-DAM/010071FN2TF/index.html
“Prime economy”, Reuters — https://graphics.reuters.com/AMAZON.COM-PRIME/010060SY1HT/index.html#shipped-items
“Texas flood disaster: Harvey has unloaded 9 trillion gallons of water“, The Washington Post — https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/08/27/texas-flood-disaster-harvey-has-unloaded-9-trillion-tons-of-water/?%3Ftid%3D=sm_pg&sdfssdfsdfsfsdfsf=
“All the rain that Hurricane Harvey dumped on Texas and Louisiana, in one massive water drop”, VOX — https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/28/16217626/harvey-houston-flood-water-visualized?utm_campaign=vox.social&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=1503958330
“Houston May Get 50 Inches of Rain. How Long Does It Take Your City to Get That Much?”, The New York Times — https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/29/upshot/harvey-rainfall-where-you-live.html
“The approximate size of various ocean animals with a Bernie for scale. A Thread.”, Open Ocean Exploration — https://twitter.com/RebeccaRHelm/status/1352454555959783430?s=20
“Sizing up Australia’s bushfires”, Reuters Graphics — https://graphics.reuters.com/AUSTRALIA-BUSHFIRES-SCALE/0100B4VK2PN/index.html
“The True Size of Africa”, Kai Krause — http://kai.sub.blue/en/africa.html
“Ever Given Ever Ywhere”, Garrett Dash Nelson — https://evergiven-everywhere.glitch.me/
“Godzilla vs Kong Wherever the h*ck you want”, Ross Thorn — https://godzilla-kong-map.glitch.me
Interactive Tools
Tools to make your own comparisions.
“Dictionary of Numbers”, Glen Chiacchieri — https://dictionaryofnumbers.com/
“Is That A Big Number?”, Andrew C. A. Elliott — http://www.isthatabignumber.com/
“So many a second”, Studio Ludens — http://smas.studioludens.com/
Wolphram Alpha — https://www.wolframalpha.com
“How Big”, Hans Hack — https://hanshack.com/geotools/howbig/
“Reprojector”, Hans Hack — https://hanshack.com/geotools/reprojector/
“The True Size Of…”, James Talmage and Damon Maneice — https://thetruesize.com
“scale-a-tron”, Stamen — https://stamen.github.io/scale-a-tron/
“Insizeor”, Garrett Dash Nelson — https://insizeor.netlify.app/
Research papers / books
Barrio, P.J., Goldstein, D.G. & Hofman, J.M. 2016, »Improving Comprehension of Numbers in the News«, Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 2729.
Blastland, M. & Dilnot, A.W. 2009, The numbers game : the commonsense guide to understanding numbers in the news, in politics, and in life, Penguin Group, New York, N.Y.
Chevalier, F., Vuillemot, R. & Gali, G. 2013, »Using Concrete Scales: A Practical Framework for Effective Visual Depiction of Complex Measures«, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 19, no. 12, pp. 2426–2435.
Jones, M.G. & Taylor, A.R. 2009, »Developing a sense of scale: Looking backward«, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 460–475.
Ma, J. 2007, Visitor’s Drawings of Small. Available: http://www.nisenet.org/catalog/evaluation/visitors_drawings_small_2007_formative_evaluation [2017, 12/11].
Nieman, A. 2011, »Concrete vs abstract visualisation: The real world as a canvas for data visualisation« in Proceedings of the ADS-VIS 2011: Making visible the invisible: art, design and science in data visualisation, ed. M. Hohl, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, pp. 49–56.
Parker, J.D. 2011, »Using Google Earth to Teach the Magnitude of Deep Time«, Journal of College Science Teaching, vol. 40, no. 5, pp. 23–27.
Resnick, I., Davatzes, A., Newcombe, N.S. & Shipley, T.F. 2017a, »Using analogy to learn about phenomena at scales outside human perception«, Cognitive Research, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 21. Epub 2017 Mar 20 doi:10.1186/s41235–017–0054–7.
Song, M. & Quintana, C. 2012, »Representing Too Small to See As Too Small to See with Temporal Representation«, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 1441
