Discursive Information Graphics -or - "What May Be"

This graphic from last week's Guardian is sound but initially I thought it could be easily improved.

It shows seasonal league places of Newcastle Utd and their managers. For Non-UK readers - Newcastle were relegated from the top football league in England recently - and many say there was not one major reason but many difficulties throughout the club. 

I thought that graphics such as this provide a place for quantitative reasoning and that a few more layers of data could make this more interesting.

Extra layers of data that could have told the story of the contributing factors to the collapse of this football club are:

- money invested

- profits made by board/ owners
- changes in backroom staff
- changes in executive staff
- new signings ( and their provenance, cost, effectiveness)
- accumulating wage bill

- general accounts - money in/ out 

- comparative debt with other english clubs - compared with those on continent

Thinking about the above, I remembered that caution is needed when presenting causal factors.

One must be careful in the data selected as the very selection and presentation of one set of data with another will imply a kind of relationship if not correlation or causality.

One could argue that this is a shortcoming of graphics versus text - that the presentation of so many  factors is a dance between many causes and and many effects, 

To freeze this complex and dynamic interplay renders it untrue - and that text, with it's pace, nuance and vagary is the best way to allude to complex relationships that cannot be shown.

Maybe a solution to this would be to borrow from the language of business diagrams - analytical devices that investigate dilemmas.Or just provide graphics that present the different reasons, separate from each other and any implicit causality.

So maybe rather than using these to provide evidence, one could provide them as discursive pieces -"What might have gone wrong.

Information graphics that support not one truth but many, prompting inquisitiveness in the readers - rather than having to be always right.

I'm working on one of these at the moment. More later.

Comments

[James Lytle]

Excellent observations. I would add a measure of ticket sales.

[Max Gadney]

James - I agree - that will be a fantastic indicator of fan loyalty next season too. There are loads more data sets that could tell stories here - travelling fans included - that is where i would like to see the papers take their information graphics - you can imply emotion in a quantitative way if you report the emotional stuff.