By Liam Jackson, Savannah Rawlins & Taylor Weiss

Link to our Infographic: https://www.canva.com/design/DAFTv_-WZoM/XuvfgmAJxzvUA522ZL46EQ/view?utm_c

Objective 

The intended goal of our infographic is to show how Netflix’s mini-series The Queen’s Gambit had an impact on the global chess world –the chess entertainment market, internet platforms, and gender disparity. The static infographic is to be shared online through social media platforms, specifically Instagram, since The Queen’s Gambit trended on social media after its’ release on October 23, 2020. Our intended viewers for the infographic are people who have come across and interacted with posts about The Queen’s Gambit on social media platforms, as this will be of most interest to them. Social media is about consuming small amounts of information for a short amount of time, and most notably, is used as an escape from work and responsibilities. This means that users will have the high level action of analyzing data by consuming existing information presented in our infographic (Munzner, 2015). The goal is for the user to enjoy the information that they happen to find, as they will most likely be scrolling through social media on posts related to chess. For the mid level action of searching, our users are specifically exploring the infographic for information. We have placed pop-outs and indicators to help the user find the most important–or interesting–information. These indicators will also help guide the user along as they swipe through the infographic. Lastly, the low level query actions are identification and comparison, which involve visualizations containing either single or multiple targets depending on the data being presented.

Dataset details

From an early stage, we realized that data on internet chess and The Queen’s Gambit is scarce. As a result, we pulled a very large breadth of information from a variety of different sources. This allowed us to pick and choose the narrative that we wanted to focus on. Statista, a market and consumer data aggregator, was particularly useful in providing us with a global perspective through the dataset entitled “Size of the global chess market from 2012 to 2022”. As mentioned previously, the data for this topic is few and far between. We were required to manually wrangle a significant percentage of the information that eventually would go into our infographic. One of the major sources for this data is The International Chess Federation’s official website, which provides detailed statistics on chess player rankings and tournaments. Normally this data can be downloaded as a text file, but the links are currently broken. We pulled the top professional players from several categories and for both men and women which allowed us to examine the perceived gender disparity in the chess community. 

Another important site of investigation was the website “twitchtracker.com”, which records statistics related to Twitch, a live broadcasting service and popular platform for chess entertainers. The website allowed us to specify date ranges for channels of interest, allowing us to look for trends during the pandemic. Unfortunately, the service does not provide any csv files. 

Additional sources of data include: the size of one of the largest internet chess servers over time (sources from lichess.org), amount of visits to chess-related wikipedia pages (sourced from wikimedia statistics), and popular google trends. 

We used excel and google sheets to clean the majority of our datasets. As we were dealing with a relatively small amount of data, it was manageable to format using basic platforms rather than Tableau Prep. That it is rather time-consuming is one of the major drawbacks of this process. 

When gathering our data, we took into consideration the sources of where the information came from, such as their credentials. We were also aware of avoiding any harm, both physical and mental, that may have occurred during the data gathering process –or the potential for harm in the overall story and visuals of the infographic. Additionally, we acknowledge that data cannot entirely be unbiased, as any process that involves human application will leave traces of subjectivity. Since part of our story is about revealing the gender gap in the chess world, we have attempted to leave out any biases in the data we’ve gathered and its representation through visualizations.

After the excel files were finished, we uploaded them to Tableau and made graphs to help identify and observe trends in the data. This principal step was to assist us in building and organizing the story for our infographic. Once we understood how to correctly express the data, we finalized the storyline and design for each page. Some of the visualizations, such as the map on page 2, were created in Tableau because the app afforded us to do so. Other data, such as the size of the global chess market on page 4, was able to be imported directly into Canva. We chose to build the infographic using Canva because of our familiarity with the platform. The tools available on Canva’s platform allow for easy building of correctly sized pages and resolutions, exact to Instagram’s post formatting options. Another strength is that Canva allows csv files to be uploaded which affords easy manipulation and building for further data visualizations that were previously created in Tableau.

Analytic Steps

The overall goal for understanding the data was to identify the timeline of when The Queen’s Gambit was released in relation to the information –what it was conveying before, during, and after the show came out. Some of the data we found was already organized visually, so we used this as a starting point for understanding how our data could be presented. This meant that for some of our data, we knew what the interesting patterns looked like before creating them on our own. Once we had decided that we were designing an infographic for mobile display, we knew that the use of certain idioms would be unfeasible. Therefore, even though some of the data was already presented to us in a visually pleasing way, we had to take into consideration the design principles best suited for viewing on mobile devices. 

One of the first decisions we had to make was which data to focus on from the Twitch dataset. We gathered two metrics for various streamers: average viewers and followers gained. We determined that the viewership data is more misleading because it fails to account for the fact that the number of viewers can fluctuate almost haphazardly depending on what other events are going on or what types of content is being streamed. Therefore, it was best to show only the data for number of followers gained because it charts a more consistent rise, especially after the release of The Queen’s Gambit.

 
One of the issues we encountered was that most of our data was showing the same thing: a “spike”. We decided it would be wasteful to include more line graphs than necessary, so we had to pick and choose from a number of interesting graphs.

 

 

 

 

Based on articles from multiple magazines and news sources such as Variety, Deadline, Vanity Fair, Business Insider, and even Netflix itself, we knew from the beginning that there was a key idea to be communicated which is that the show had impacted multiple areas of the chess world. While most of the data we collected supported these articles and their arguments, there was one subject that surprised us. Before collecting any data, we had hypothesized that there was an exponential increase in the number of women in the chess community, slightly closing the gender gap. However, when we visually compared the data for men and women chess players, we noticed that there was not much of a change in the gender gap following the release of The Queen’s Gambit. As a result, this part of our story had to change and our visualization needed to illustrate that there remains an unequal dichotomy between men and women in the sport.

Design Process and Principles:

To begin designing our infographic we created a mood board that clearly laid out the themes and desired color palette in order to stay consistent throughout the whole design. Our infographic would include data visualizations, illustrations, and text to guide the viewer along the story of how The Queen’s Gambit changed the chess world. We wanted to create a static infographic that could be used on social media platforms to convey the information discovered about when The Queen’s Gambit was released in 2020, and further the chess statistics from that time period. Our infographic would then be made interactive through the sharing abilities made available on social media. As the buzz around the show and the emerging chess world all occurred online, during the peak of the global pandemic, we considered our infographic as designed for social media purposes would do the best in terms of visibility and attainment. Thus, we majorly considered the audience appeal and information retention of our design to achieve a high-performing engaging post. Our infographic has a total of 5 hues (2 of them having 2 separate saturations) and minimal, readable text. As well, chess iconography and terminology is included throughout to attract users. We began analyzing our data visualization made in Tableau, finding the major trends and themes, sketching out the order of this storyline and how it would occur in an Instagram carousel post, for effortless utility of following along the storyline. We made a rough draft of the layout in Canva, piecing together the topics of each individual frame, and began designing.

 

In this process of our design we wanted to ensure the data visualizations and captions surrounding them were not only the focus, but also legible to be viewed and understood on a cellphone. In creating our data visualizations to match our color scheme and theme, we ensured to match all attributes to their correct visual channels, implemented design principles of expressiveness and effectiveness. For example, looking at the page titled “Streamers Spotlight ”, the categorical data of chess streamers is mapped to the identity channel of hue, ensuring the principle of expressiveness. With each data visualization we also took into account the principle of effectiveness, mapping each attribute to the most salient channels. For example, again in streamers line chart, the dotted line added a pop-out effect to indicate when The Queen’s Gambit was released.

Keeping with Lankow’s et al. (2012) critical framework on what makes a good infographic: beauty, utility and soundness were at the heart of our design. We took format and design quality into consideration, along with the beauty of our final product, given the social media audience of our infographic and how the title page is perceived on a feed. As Lankow et al. (2012) states the utility of an infographic is measured by how it reaches its objectives (p. 199). The utility of our final project is a narrative infographic that guides the viewer along a story, focusing mainly on audience appeal and information retention. Finally, as Lankow et al. (2012) comments on soundness as the meaningfulness of an infographic, we choose to include the final framed image as the sources used to create our datasets to give our infographic sound and allow credibility for our viewers.

As you can see below, our final infographic fits within Instagram’s carousel formatting, making it available and easily viewable for our audience.

The Story of our Infographic

The objective is to explain to the audience how The Queen’s Gambit has impacted chess set sales, certain demographics, and chess streamers by presenting the information through visualizations. With this case study, we thought we could point out that although the public interest in chess clearly improved, the show’s introduction shed light on a more negative side of the sport: its glaring gender disparity. The enormous rise in online chess participation coupled with meteoric increases in viewership of female chess streamers overshadows the seemingly stagnant ratio of men to women in the professional scene. While the growth in chess playing offers interesting insights, it’s also important to remember that it can be misleading to assume that the pandemic played no part in this. We hope that our infographic will both draw attention to the issue and at the same time help researchers to gain insight into key areas for change and development.

Pros and Cons of Our Design

Our infographic is easily accessible and shareable. In terms of design appeal, it contains chess iconography that captures users’ attention. However, we didn’t find all of the data we expected to, so we had to fill in gaps of the story. Compared to a more desktop-friendly format, the infographic is limited in terms of how much textual information can be displayed. This means that we were forced to prioritize clarity over depth in some cases. 

The final two slides, which show data related to the gender breakdown of professional chess players, are interesting because they demonstrate that there is very much still a disparity between the top men and women in the scene. However, it doesn’t necessarily show an impact on the community, which is what our infographic is meant to concentrate on. We were aware of this during our data gathering process and had limited options to choose from as far as data sources. Finishing the graphic with these statistics is still useful because it leaves viewers with questions for future inquiry.

Sources

Dottle, R. (2020, December 16). Netflix’s ‘the queen’s gambit’ drives major boom in chess sales, games. Bloomberg.com. Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-chess-boom/?leadSource=uverify+wall 

FIDE ratings and statistics. FIDE Ratings and Statistics. (n.d.). Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://ratings.fide.com/

Framke, C. (2020, October 21). ‘the queen’s gambit,’ starring a magnetic Anya Taylor-Joy, is a shrewd study of Genius: TV Review. Variety. Retrieved December 5, 2022, from https://variety.com/2020/tv/reviews/the-queens-gambit-review-anya-taylor-joy-1234810169/ 

From the ‘queen’s gambit’ to a record-setting checkmate. About Netflix. (n.d.). Retrieved December 5, 2022, from https://about.netflix.com/en/news/the-queens-gambit-netflix-most-watched-scripted-limited-series 

Heer, J., & Shneiderman, B. (2012). Interactive Dynamics for visual analysis. Queue, 10(2), 30–55. https://doi.org/10.1145/2133416.2146416 

Lankow, J., Ritchie, J., & Crooks, R. (2012). Infographics: The Power of Visual storytelling. Wiley. 

Munzner, T. (2015). Visualization Analysis & Design. CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group. 

The queen’s gambit streaming • flixpatrol. FlixPatrol. (n.d.). Retrieved December 5, 2022, from https://flixpatrol.com/title/the-queens-gambit/streaming/ 

Tighe, D. (2022, January 14). Global Chess Market Size 2012-2022. Statista. Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/809953/global-chess-market-size/ 

Twitch channels, games and Global Statistics · Twitchtracker. (n.d.). Retrieved December 7, 2022, from https://twitchtracker.com/