Meta-information: visualizing the news

A headline from the Guardian

About a year ago, University of Huddersfield design student Dave Bowker created Designing the News, a six-part series of data graphics depicting one week's worth of information from and about the Guardian. (It earned him a First.)

The methods used in each piece focus on a specific goal of presentation, including the ranking of information, categorisation, colour coordination, illustration, graphing of complex data, and relationship tracking.

The purpose of the project is to present the news in a way that people wouldn't usually experience it. This is done by attracting the viewers with beautiful graphics, and then holding their attention with a deeper investigation into the information they see everyday.

The rundown of images and approaches can be seen here. Of the various formats and approaches, I think Thursday and Saturday are the most successful. Friday, unfortunately, turns into a blur at 20 paces, while I find Wednesday somewhat hard to interpret and therefore less usable—though still very attractive to look at; I love Dave's use of color.

By contrast, Information Aesthetics recently featured a visualization of a similar topic: all the stories in the New York Times for the year 1988. The image is beautiful to look at and jampacked with information. Even so—or maybe precisely because of its abundance of data—the reader has to invest time and careful study to extract its literal meaning; as a result, I find it rather unhelpful as a repository of information. It's more an object of meditation about how world events develop and are reported: a media mandala.

Comments

I want to be Jorge Camoes when I grow up.

Portuguese infoviz enthusiast Jorge Camoes has spent the last year and a half writing informed, insightful blog posts on the field, complete with examples and citations. To his credit, he approaches everything -- even the revered work of Edward Tufte and Stephen Few -- with loving skepticism. I'm gratified, too, that he seems to agree with me on one central point: Snazzy tools alone don't get you good data visualization. It all comes down to putting serious thought into the project before you plot the first data point. In future posts we'll discuss more of Jorge's ideas. Bem feito, o Sr. Camoes!

Everybody loves visual information — especially Abraham Lincoln.

Infographics are clearly having a cultural moment. They have become pervasive in newspapers, magazines, blog posts, and viral tweets; they appear on television and in advertising, in political campaigns and at art openings. As a Google search term, “infographic” has increased nearly twenty-fold in the last five years. Yet infographics have been popular, in one form or another, for centuries. The source of their power isn’t computers or the Internet, but the brain’s natural visual intelligence. Gareth Cook , the editor of Best American Infographics 2013 , has put together a short but true summary of the history of information graphics. (Many of you who see this blog may know most of it already.) His striking lede recounts how much Abraham Lincoln valued his "slave map," shown above. Lincoln's reliance on the shades of gray throughout the Confederacy made an enormous difference in his Civil War decision-making. Fortunately it's rare that most people have to make l

Hype and backlash:
visualizing pop culture trends

Back in 2005, the astute pop-culture chronicler Adam Sternbergh pointed out that a person's opinion of any given entertainment product depends largely on how long they've been aware of it — that is, where the product sits on the sine-wave timeline of public expectations (aka buzz). His findings, in chart form: "Welcome to the undulating curve of shifting expectations—the Heisenbergian principle by which hype determines how much you enjoy a given pop-culture phenomenon. The first-wave audience is pleasantly surprised, but the second-wavers feel let down; then the third wave finds it’s not as bad as they’ve heard—and they’re all watching the exact same show." Almost five years later, this pattern describes just about all our collective experiences. Sports fans, how much sweeter was it to watch the New Orleans Saints come out of nowhere to win the NFC championship than to have seen the Minnesota Vikings do it for the umpteenth time? As for politics, consider the poll

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