An idea whose time has come: combining card art and data visualization

I absolutely love my "day job". I'm an analytics lead at an agency in the health and medical sector, managing a team of developers and analysts and working with product owners that are all putting a great deal of effort into getting health information to the right people at the right time. It's a challenge because people are struggling right now to figure out what to do for their own health, and what sources of information are credible -- and it's hard for those of us who provide the content to see how we are making a difference. Visualizing data is such an important part of that. In my world, data visualization is the "last mile" of research that makes the difference between one's audience not understanding the findings, and having an "a-ha" moment. I believe in three things that make data visualization an important part of how we communicate and share ideas:

1. People are primarily visual learners. The human brain absorbs visuals far more quickly than text. Especially in a culture that saturates us with information, it can be easier to present complex ideas in visual format than to explain them.
2. When done well, data visualization can cut through unconscious bias. When words can fail us because they contain unconscious or implicit bias, visuals can allow us to interpret facts and data in clear and logical ways, without being boxed into context. 
3. Visualizations can present data in fresh and new ways that make us think. In the context of cards and card art, this is the biggest opportunity. How can we present a type of data that we are so used to seeing in the conventional way, in a way that makes us think differently about our data, and that looks artful and interesting?

I'm also teaching a graduate course in data visualization, highlighting and helping students develop case studies so that they can use visuals to show insights to their peers, colleagues, leadership, and the outside world.

I've been doing this type of work for long enough--since I finished graduate school more than twenty years ago--that I think often about how we can show data in new and interesting ways. This was one of my motivations for getting into card art, in addition to the pleasure that adding to the imagery on the card has given to me. Over the last few weeks, I've been thinking more about what is on the back of the card. This convention hasn't changed much in decades. The back of the card has always been reserved for the player's statistics, and it's been part of the fun of collecting to look at those statistics on the back of the card, especially if they are from a season with a notable achievement.

What if one could rethink the back of the card? What if instead of presenting a full set of numbers for a single player, if they could show how that player compared with their peers? What if this could be accomplished visually, so that the front and the back of the card both had design elements to them?

My first attempt was as a followup to the Josh Gibson project. I wanted to show how the uncertainty about Gibson's career home run total (Baseball Reference attributes 165 homers to him, while other sources credit him with as many as 962) and the comparisons with the generally accepted totals of Roger Connor, Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Barry Bonds. 

I made a painting inspired by an image of Gibson at bat, next to a series of circles with areas representing the carer totals for the five hitters. I found a printer who can print cards for a reasonable price, so for the back of the card I used a scatterplot that I created in Tableau Public, using data from Stathead, showing the five leading hitters, along with about the top 500 career home run hitters in history. 

It's a compelling result: there's value to being able to turn the card over and show both how prodigious a hitter Josh Gibson may have been, but also how poorly Negro League statistics were often kept, due to the lack of resources compared to the White majors. It shows the huge growth in home runs after the dead ball era. That said, it's a crowded visualization that might be a bit hard to read.

I wanted to take a narrower approach for the next card, and that opportunity came when Patrick Bone, who goes by @CheahaCardworks on Twitter, tweeted this post: 

This was the opportunity to make a card from scratch. The idea of collecting interpretations of the same card (in this case, Ron Gant's from the 1989 Topps set) is a huge honor for the card art community, so this gave me a strong motivation to take part. I've had good success with creating layered cards using two identical (or complementary) cards. In this case, I used the border of the 1989 card over his 1988 Donruss card; I like the pose on the latter card, and the back of the original card are the statistics from 1987, his first games in the majors. (I talked about how I make these layered cards in an earlier post about my Juan Soto project.)

In this case, I thought the card turned out very well because while I like both photos, the Topps card isn't his "true" rookie card -- though it highlights what he did in his rookie season, there's always something fresh and new about the very first time that a player appears in a pack. I added the little rookie highlight from the Topps card, though. So for the front image, this is what I edited in my iPhone photo software: 

When I upload card images like this, I turn the saturation, contrast, shadows, and black filter heavily upward (if not all the way up), because I like to highlight the painting on the card and the depth of the layered effect.

For the back of the card, I wanted to create an image that was consistent with what I had done before. The tradeoff that comes with visualization versus traditional statistics is that especially when comparing players (or especially showing how a single player's statistics compare to a larger universe or population) is that a visualization can really only be limited to a few statistical measures. I think this is OK for purposes of a general comparison, but it is something to think about.

For this card, I took the same career home runs comparison and created a callout of Gant's last year in the majors (2003), and his career home run total (321):

callout of Ron Gant's last year in the majors, and his career home run total. He ended his career with a respectable 321 home runs; not one of the leaders by any means but still a solid total for a player who spent sixteen years in the majors and dealt with some serious injuries.

Once these cards come back from the printer, I'll be selling them as numbered editions (with a limit of 99). If you're interested, please let me know in the comments, using the "Contact Me" form on this blog, emailing me directly, or sending me a direct message on Twitter or Instagram (akorengold is my handle).

You can also check out my data visualizations on Tableau Public. Please continue to watch this space for how these data visualization cards develop. I'm thinking of taking a similar approach to pitchers, maybe focused on career wins to begin with.

This new direction is very exciting and is something I've thought about since I started making card paintings: how to link the creation of new things from old things with new ways of looking at data.