In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Richard Johnson chats with James Cheshire, professor of geographic information and cartography at University College London and director of its Social Data Institute, about the book Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global Story of Money (Yale University Press, September 2024). Cheshire, who illustrated the book with designer Oliver Uberti, delineates the behind-the-scenes creative process for conceiving and developing engaging data visualizations to explain the complex history of money. He explains the crucial role of data in storytelling and shares thoughts on the impact of money across geography and social stratification. An edited version of the conversation follows, and you can watch the full video at the end of this page.
What was the inspiration for this book?
Atlas of Finance wasn’t my idea. It was actually the brainchild of the lead author, Dariusz Wójcik. He is an economic geographer who was based in Oxford when he started the project. He’s now at the National University of Singapore.
Dariusz is a real map fanatic. Yet he didn’t really have the cartographic background, training, and data visualization to realize his dream of creating an atlas of financial geography. So he sent a recommendation to me and my colleague, Oliver Uberti, who’s a designer [and the designer of the book]. Then we fleshed out a plan for creating the first atlas of its kind that showed the financial world from a geographic perspective.
Dariusz really drove us to realize to create the finished book almost five years ago. He visited my office with an idea he imagined would take a few weeks of work. Now, five years later, the book has been published.
There are still so many different examples where geography matters, where one country behaves different from another. That creates disparities, which then creates opportunities and risks in the world of finance.
What surprised you about the content? Has working on the book changed your understanding of money and the effects of geography on it?
My background is in geography, but it’s not in financial geography. I’m not an expert on any of the specific topics. Working on the book was a real learning experience for me to understand the different data sets and ideas.
What really struck me was the importance that geography still has in the world of finance. We sometimes talk about the death of distance and the idea that people can communicate over Zoom. They don’t have to be in the same place all the time to interact; the internet has shrunk the world. Yet there are still so many different examples where geography matters, where one country behaves differently from another. That creates disparities, which then creates opportunities and risks in the world of finance.
My favorite reminder of that is the example of the need to connect trading centers between Chicago and New York as quickly as possible because of the New York Stock Exchange. If you can get information from Chicago more quickly on the futures trading market, which is largely based in Chicago, you’ll have an advantage in the trading systems from which you can profit.
I found it amazing when I thought of the significant lengths that companies go to for data connections between these two hubs—using microwave transmitters and fiber optic cables and more—to get it as fast as possible to secure that advantage. Again, it’s a classic example of how distance is actually the problem that they’re trying to solve. It is a geographical problem. They need to get data as quickly as possible from one point on the Earth’s surface to another. Those who win that race get to profit from it.
What were the key data visualization challenges? Were there any topics you found difficult to align with the atlas concept?
The challenge with any kind of mapmaking is to establish what you keep in and what you take out. Some people might say, “Well, doing a physical printed book is quite an old-fashioned idea.” Actually, printing a paper atlas from high-tech data is a slightly odd thing to do.
Yet one of the nice things about the idea of a printed atlas—and one of the reasons I still think it’s a fantastic communication tool—is that you know what your constraints are. You know the size of your page and what you can fit on it. You’re not trying to design for multiple different screen sizes. You’re not worrying about how something might look on a 50-inch-TV versus an iPhone screen. Knowing the size enables you to make strong editorial decisions about how much detail you include on the page. That information helps you shape and format a graphic or a visual to make it fit.
A large part of my role involved acting behind the scenes. Oliver and I worked very closely together. We’ve completed previous books in the same way, after receiving the required parameters. I had a number of exchanges with experts, saying, “You have this megadatabase, and there are about 50 different things we can look at in this database. How are we going to distill this down into a single story?”
So the storytelling is established at the beginning of the process. Then that informs the data processing, which helps inform the design, and so on.
Generally, the process unfolds in this way. The expert creates a final map, graph, or chart. The expert hands the item off to a designer, who must determine how to fit it on a page and into a report or book.
The items aren’t always compatible, so the goal is to ensure the items and process are tightly integrated. What made this project stand out is being able to design from the ground up in collaboration with Oliver, as well as being able to go back to the research team and say, “These are our constraints. How can we distill the story down into a message that can be communicated in this way?”
Can we obtain data that’s robust enough to tell a story on that particular topic? From which angle will we approach this topic? What’s the story we’re telling through the data?
How did you coordinate the style with the substance in the balance of the book?
I can’t [take credit for] that, because it’s something that Oliver, the book’s designer, focused on.
This book is about money and finance, so why not make the book look like money? Why not use some of the techniques they use in bank notes to inspire the colors and the rendering of the images? After that was established, we could choose a consistent color palette to use throughout the book. The whole point is really to create something that’s greater than the sum of its constituent parts.
You can do that in a book. You can tie it all together really nicely so it’s clear that every single page came from this particular atlas. The success of the project hinges on how well you pull that seamlessness together.
That’s the framework. But in terms of getting the final visual together, we have a mantra that we repeat again and again, for every graphic: “it’s the topic, the data, the angle, the form.”
By that we mean, is there a topic that we’re interested in? Are we interested in, for example, inequality in credit ratings across the US? That’s one of the graphics in the book that I really like. Can we obtain data that’s robust enough to tell a story on that particular topic? From which angle will we approach this topic? What’s the story we’re telling through the data?
The final element is the form, which can really dictate how the finished product looks. In the credit example, we have a fairly simple map of the US, but it’s quite a powerful one.
In hindsight, which key elements stand out since publishing the book?
Oliver and I have coauthored three books previously. We’re used to that kind of exciting moment when the first copy of the book comes through the post, and you open it. You hold the book in your hand, and you just admire the work that you’ve done on it. That was the first thing that stood out.
Unlike with previous books I’ve worked on, I’ve actually been directly involved with this one. I was involved up until the last minute, checking and working on elements because this was such a large, collaborative project, one that took a year, or even 18 months. More time may have passed after that, before the final printing. So it was an even bigger surprise when the final book came through the post.
The second thing that I took away from the project and that I really enjoyed is that it was very educational for the team. In academics, I find that people are quite reluctant and hesitant to iterate through ideas. They are reluctant to keep trying, particularly when they’re trying to visualize something. I suspect that’s probably true in all walks of life.
The coauthors were really open to the iterative process, and I got a lot out of it. I learned a lot from them about financial geography, but they learned a lot about visualization and design.
That process has created a series of ambassadors, because those of us who create visualizations and work with this type of data know that it’s easy to overlook the amount of work that goes into creating a good visualization. The best visualizations look effortless when they’re finished. Yet often, they’re the ones that take the most work. So it’s nice to be able to share that journey with a new group of people.
Share more about the spreads you really enjoyed.
The football spread was at the furthest margins of my interest and expertise. My key takeaway from that is the idea that football players are assets that can be traded now. We do a fantastic job of showing why there’s so much money in football and how these assets are traded.
Since this is a book about finance, we must have a graphic about coins in the book, the earliest coins, and the spread of Roman coins. That was one we visualized initially. There was a lot of dialogue between the researchers who supplied that data set just to make sure it was very robust. The Roman coin visual is actually a quite simple map. It’s comprised of dots that show counts of where the coins are found, yet it warranted a lot of iteration. One of our objectives was to ensure that the researchers themselves were happy with both the final graphic and the interpretation of it.
There are so many different topics. No one is the world expert necessarily on every single topic covered, so checking with world experts on these concepts is important.
The US ratings visual is one that stands out to me, and the credit visual does as well. This one was highlighted in a review in The Irish Times. It stands out to me because it shows in a slightly indirect way what the manifestations of inequality are in a variety of different methods. It is a map of how consumers, individuals within particular counties, are rated according to their credit score.
There are large discrepancies between some parts of the US. For example, the South tends to have fewer people with good ratings. In the more affluent parts of the US, there are more people who have higher ratings.
Entrenched inequalities that exist in the system tend to manifest themselves in some way. If you can’t access credit to buy a house or even a car or something like that, then that really holds you back. That is something that often gets overlooked. Those who are in a privileged position and able to access credit take it for granted that they can do that, that they can get a mortgage for a house. But these issues are actually long lasting and entrenched.
It’s a very nice encapsulation of a whole series of societal problems, and an invitation really to think more creatively about how things like credit and related details are scored and allocated.
When we’re creating data visualizations, we’re still looking to persuade people of an idea, potentially. We’re still looking to find new insights. We’re looking to bring people with us.
Are there any other key takeaways?
People often state, “Well, everyone should do better data visualization. So how do I take away things that are in this book? And how can I bring it into my day-to-day work?”
The answer is the thinking should always be the same, even if the aspiration may be slightly different.
Even if we’re creating small visuals, when we’re creating data visualizations, we’re still looking to persuade people of an idea, potentially. We’re still looking to find new insights. We’re looking to bring people with us.
We think through the tools and the techniques that we deployed in this atlas and say, “How is it that we use this particular graphic to tell a story?” Also, when we’ve left quite a lot of data out of a particular graphic, people understand why because it helps them focus on what really matters. The interrogation and inspiration stemming from these books is really valuable because even a small thing, like adding a caption or an invitation to a simple scatter chart, or using a bar chart, rather than a pie chart, to show something can make a huge difference.
Once you get into the routine of thinking through the process, you’ll find that your visuals are much more compelling. You’ll have a much bigger impact on the people with whom you’re communicating—be it the person you’re seated next to, a room full of people at a particular meeting, or a client.
