Death Penalty Executions in US by State, visualized in the most nightmarishly convoluted way imaginable.

๐ŸŽ™๏ธ oldaustraliancrawl ยท 597 points ยท Posted at 17:18:13 on April 2, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Iciclewind ยท 214 points ยท Posted at 18:27:44 on April 2, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

This is hilarious. Not sure if actually too ingenious for us.

DanHeidel ยท 76 points ยท Posted at 19:10:10 on April 2, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Is it really ugly or just too beautiful for our fallible eyes to grasp?

dekrant ยท 44 points ยท Posted at 08:28:43 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Chernoff Faces. It's a method of encoding multidimensional data. The theory is that human perception is wired to read facial language, so having different dimensions encoded as a different aspect of a face is a good way for classification.

Drawbacks are that A) it doesn't look quite right B) only categorical data, not continuous. To A's point, there's few combinations that actually look like a real face, and it never quite worked. With B, you can do a scale of happy/sad and skin color, but it's still really weird.

Multidimensional data on a static image is really, really difficult.

lugosky ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 20:42:55 on April 2, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

I know either a hilarious coincidence or a hysterical macabre construction. Either way it's funny.

pferone ยท 111 points ยท Posted at 00:01:08 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Reminds me of this, a pretty famous 1977 example of Chernoff's idea to visualize data with faces.

Notagtipsy ยท 65 points ยท Posted at 00:22:47 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)*

This makes sense and I can immediately relate the shape to its info because the metaphor works (eg, white skin for % white, happy eyebrows for low stress). The OP is convoluted and uses shapes with no particular meaning to convey info, such as a square eye for firing squad and such. The concept may be the same, but the execution heh is way different.

pferone ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 00:26:47 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Totally agree with you, I just wanted to put this out as a source.

hswerdfe ยท 23 points ยท Posted at 01:02:25 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Wow thanks for pointing this out. Chernoff's 1977 version is much better put together than Rothberg's 2007 version. It makes me wonder if the 2007 version could be done better? I think I would:

*start with the colour, and normalize it to the proportion of the general population that is white.

  • eliminate these ovals and just go with a head size based on proportion of population executed

  • the age is harder, perhaps it could be represented with coloured hair (grey = older), or some other indicator of age (wrinkles maybe)

  • I think the method might be simple too much information to convey.

pferone ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 02:06:48 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Definitely, I think you bring up great points. I'd say even the coloring of the map (death penalty vs. non death penalty) can probably be simplified to greyscale or something. In general, it's really helpful and productive when your data informs your method of representation.
Just as a note, the image that I linked is by Eugene Turner, who was just using the ideas of Herman Chernoff. While some people who work in data visualization criticize using faces, I think this one is pretty intuitive.

dekrant ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 08:30:59 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

I mean the whole point of Chernoff Faces were due to the idea that human evolution has made us attune to differences in facial expression. The glyph idea seems more abstract, and therefore more attractive for use in visualizations, but I've found them much more difficult to comprehend than Chernoff Faces.

One thing that the OP has going for it is that skin color is actually represented well here. It's tricky, because it can imply racism, but since it actually represents ethnicity, it's logical. The use of skin as a encoding dimension struck me as the biggest drawback to Chernoff Faces when I first learned about them.

pfohl ยท 38 points ยท Posted at 21:03:06 on April 2, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Texas looks pretty proud of itself.

NeoKabuto ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 21:22:38 on April 2, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Nebraska just wants to take a nap after a long day of electrocuting 40-50 year olds.

[deleted] ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 11:56:10 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Same.

ofsinope ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 14:23:40 on April 7, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

North Carolina is real upbeat about executing lots of young people. ;)

vmcreative ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 16:16:35 on August 16, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

That's Virginia.

eperopolis0 ยท 53 points ยท Posted at 18:24:21 on April 2, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Isn't it more sad to kill young people?

[deleted] ยท 24 points ยท Posted at 04:17:26 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)*

[deleted]

Five15Factor2 ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 23:47:33 on April 10, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

r/nocontext

BeardySam ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 22:20:34 on April 2, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Smiley faces for the under 40 executions?

[deleted] ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 22:52:21 on April 2, 2016 ยท (Permalink)*

[deleted]

BeardySam ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 08:54:05 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

:D

Sw4rmlord ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 21:36:32 on April 2, 2016 ยท (Permalink)*

I don't think it's so hard to read, though I had to look for a while to find that Nevada Utah was the state using firing squads.

I am surprised we don't execute more people

Edit: Geography Fail

cgimusic ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 21:50:13 on April 2, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

though I had to look for a while to find that Nevada was the state using firing squads

Maybe you want to re-think your first statement given that it seems to be Utah that use firing squads (at least if I'm reading it right, it's a really shit visualization).

Sw4rmlord ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 22:51:36 on April 2, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Or just my knowledge of American Geography lmfao

Kiffe_Y ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 19:40:08 on July 27, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

I only found out about this graph now, but holy shit, do you actually hang people in the US? Gas chambers? Firing Squads?

Sw4rmlord ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 22:30:01 on July 27, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Yah? How else are we supposed to get rid of people we don't don't.

festingerslovechild ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 06:10:24 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Part of me thinks this is kind of cute. Another part of me is sick of having to constantly go back to the key to figure out what everything means.

banshee_bubbles ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 23:25:54 on April 2, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Look at how happy Texas is!

avec_serif ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 03:05:52 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

That is a masterpiece.

NinjaLanternShark ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 17:37:09 on April 2, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

What state's the viz author from? Hopefully it's one of the states in red....

ButterDream ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 22:41:48 on April 2, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Chernoff faces are the worst.

[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:14:45 on July 30, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Those faces make me Chernoff

Lilly_Satou ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 06:01:28 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Nebraska has electrocuted a lot of middle aged black people

skalg ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 13:09:38 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Soooo, killing a lot of young people with lethal injection creates the happiest smiley? I smell an agenda...

c3534l ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 17:02:38 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

As stupid as this is, I kind of like it.

precambriansupereon ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 01:23:55 on April 6, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

I appreciate that Texas got its own "405" bubble.

What happened when both eyes are the same? Is that the only method used?

hessians4hire ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:03:02 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

I kinda like it.

Harryinmontreal ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 12:54:38 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

I find it very clear. I just don't see a clear diff between the purple and green colour states. Are greens states that had cap pun at one time and have banned it?

siosilvar ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 06:12:36 on April 4, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Other way around, I think; green states don't have capital punishment, purple states do but never used it.

Epistaxis ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:18:41 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

;)

Galfonz ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:01:36 on April 3, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

It bothers me that he thought well enough of this to sign it.

andrewsad1 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:28:27 on May 1, 2016 ยท (Permalink)*

I like the fact that my home state is the only purple one surrounded by red

StupidSolipsist ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:07:10 on July 27, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Methods used (most common on left of face)

What I find most remarkable is that they say this, then use the left/right perspective OF THE FACE. To us, it's on the RIGHT side.

Grosserly ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:13:53 on August 19, 2016 ยท (Permalink)

Thumbnail looks like a strawberry.