I See What You Mean

Over at Eager Eyes , Robert Kosara has a suggestion for the Obama Administration. He points out that making the government's raw data available to the public could enhance governmental transparency* and lead to some new ways of looking at the country's problems. The challenge is not only data availability. A lot of data is, in fact, available. The US is the most transparent nation in the world – to an extent that can be frightening to an outsider (think pay data for state employees, property tax data, etc.). The challenge is that a lot of data is published in a format that is human-readable, not machine-readable. This might sound like a good thing, but it's not. Machine-readable data can be processed and transformed into any number of human-readable forms, that direction is trivial. Making human-readable data accessible to a machine is much more difficult, error-prone, and expensive. What we need is a National Data Agency (NDA). This agency would be tasked with collecting ...

Dave Gray's thriving firm, Xplane , introduces businesses to "visual thinking": Visual thinking is a way to organize your thoughts and improve your ability to think and communicate. It's a way to expand your range and capacity by going beyond the linear world of the written word, list and spreadsheet, and entering the non-linear world of complex spacial relationships, networks, maps and diagrams. In other words, it's infoviz (which is usually based on hard data ) plus sketching, mind-mapping, flow charts, symbols and more. Gray has uploaded nine learning modules on the topic at his Visual Thinking School ; though breezy and charming, they're less useful as how-to lessons than as a further reminder of how instantly and powerfully images can convey information. (For examples, see especially the Visual Mapping module .)

Last week I finally caught Patrick Creadon's documentary I.O.U.S.A. , in which former comptroller general David Walker and former Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson explain why the national debt is 1) so huge, 2) even more enormous than most people realize, 3) not going away anytime soon and 4) actually a threat to the continued viability of the US as a trading partner/solvent nation. Sobering message notwithstanding, I found the film gripping—in large part because of Brian Oakes 's remarkably clear and cogent data presentation throughout. The dimensions and meaning of the national debt are so amorphous to most people that the film would never have succeeded without infoviz graphics. And Oakes is a master of the form. Check it out: From a recent Q&A with Oakes at Design Observer : What other roles does design play in the dissemination of the film's message? When you are dealing with many graphic sequences that are popping up throughout the film, it is very important to co...

When I try to describe the field of information visualization to folks who haven't heard of it, I end up gesturing a lot, or resorting to vague buzzwords, or talking about bar graphs and pie charts and leaving my companion wondering what's so all-fired cool or revolutionary about that stuff. But now I'm starting to think of it as akin to translation. Here's why. You can take this: There are key differences between Great Britain, the United Kingdom, and England—names often used interchangeably. Great Britain Great Britain is an island that consists of three somewhat autonomous regions that include England, Scotland, and Wales. It is located east of Ireland and northwest of France in the Atlantic Ocean. The United Kingdom The United Kingdom is a country that includes England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Its official name is “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.” England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are often mistaken as names of count...

As part of his larger mission of promoting "fact-based" public health policy, Swedish physician Hans Rosling founded Gapminder.org , which aims to make world health data available and understandable to everyone. Back in 2006, Rosling gave a well-received TED presentation on the principles of Gapminder, showing, among other things, relative historical changes in life expectancy and GDP. ( He spoke again in 2007. ) Rosling acknowledges that there are some small flaws and inconsistencies with data derived from all these different sources, but believes that the comparative results are far more significant. Check out the vast difference between Mauritius and Congo in income per person and life expectancy (shown on the Gapminder site and in the '06 presentation); consequently, says Rosling, using the term "sub-Saharan Africa" to describe both of these countries is vague to the point of uselessness. His point: The more easily data and details can be visualized and co...

Overnewsed but uninformed-- Stefan Bräutigam The explanation, auto-translated from the German by Google (!) and tidied up slightly by me (!!), reads thus: With access to news possible at any time via a variety of communication channels, a broad media landscape with a myriad of information producers and suppliers has developed. For the viewer it becomes more difficult to determine the authenticity of messages. You are looking for sources that can be trusted. Overnewsed but Uninformed helps in the search. Sequences are described, ownership and dependencies disclosed, and user behavior illustrated. Background information, monitoring and analysis show how the real message — of a bridge fall in Minneapolis [in this case] — can be assessed and categorized. Unfortunately, if you want to see the whole thing up close, you'll have to download the 22MB PDF file here . [Via Visual Complexity ]

Mined Originally uploaded by Champagnerocker Two fab — and overlapping — flickr sets: Song Chart meme and Song Chart . Hours of silly fun (even if, like me, you're too old/stodgy to know many of the songs). Right now my favorite is this one . But with everything that's on offer, I may find something even better ... Stay tuned, as it were.