What’s behind a #1 ranking? by Manny Morone.
From the post:
Behind every “Top 100” list is a generous sprinkling of personal bias and subjective decisions. Lacking the tools to calculate how factors like median home prices and crime rates actually affect the “best places to live,” the public must take experts’ analysis at face value.
To shed light on the trustworthiness of rankings, Harvard researchers have created LineUp, an open-source application that empowers ordinary citizens to make quick, easy judgments about rankings based on multiple attributes.
“It liberates people,” says Alexander Lex, a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). “Imagine if a magazine published a ranking of ‘best restaurants.’ With this tool, we don’t have to rely on the editors’ skewed or specific perceptions. Everybody on the Internet can go there and see what’s really in the data and what part is personal opinion.”
…So intuitive and powerful is LineUp, that its creators—Lex; his adviser Hanspeter Pfister, An Wang Professor of Computer Science at SEAS; Nils Gehlenborg, a research associate at Harvard Medical School; and Marc Streit and Samuel Gratzl at Johannes Kepler University in Linz—earned the best paper award at the IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis) conference in October 2013.
LineUp is part of a larger software package called Caleydo, an open-source visualization framework developed at Harvard, Johannes Kepler University, and Graz University of Technology. Caleydo visualizes genetic data and biological pathways—for example, to analyze and characterize cancer subtypes.
LineUp software: http://lineup.caleydo.org/
From the LineUp homepage:
While the visualization of a ranking itself is straightforward, its interpretation is not, because the rank of an item represents only a summary of a potentially complicated relationship between its attributes and those of the other items. It is also common that alternative rankings exist which need to be compared and analyzed to gain insight into how multiple heterogeneous attributes affect the rankings. Advanced visual exploration tools are needed to make this process efficient.
Interesting contrast. The blog post says that LineUp: “[we can see] what’s really in the data and what part is personal opinion” to “gain insight into how multiple heterogeneous attributes affect the rankings” at the website.
I think the website is being more realistic.
Being able to explore how the “multiple heterogeneous attributes affect the rankings” enables you to deliver rankings as close as possible to your boss’ or client’s expectations.
You can just imagine what software promoters will be doing with this. Our software is up 500% percent (Translation: We had 10 users, now we have 50 users.)
When asked they will truthfully say, it’s the best data we have.