Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Here's one of those online sites that will keep us browsing for hours. “Information Aesthetics” weblog says it's about “form follows data – towards creative information visualiztion.” Indeed so. How about links to:
The principles are here showing how creative journalism might deliver pertinent data/information to the people. Information Aesthetics is updated often.
NYTimes science writer Gina Kolata publishes an interesting – and for her, atypical – story Sunday related to content analysis and the integration of statistical and graphic tools. (See “Enron Offers An Unlikely Boost To E-Mail Surveillance.”)The data under the digital microscope? One and a half million e-mails sent by the good folks at Enron that were posted to the Web in 2003 by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. She writes:
“Scientists had long theorized that tracking the e-mailing and word usage patterns within a group over time – without ever actually reading a single e-mail – could reveal a lot about what that group was up to. For example, would they be able to find the moment when someone's memos, which were routinely read by a long list of people who never responded, suddenly began generating private responses from some recipients? Could they spot when a new person entered a communications chain, or if old ones were suddenly shut out, and correlate it with something significant?
There may be commercial uses for the same techniques. For example, they may enable advertisers to do word searches on individual e-mail accounts and direct pitches based on word frequency.”
Gee, scientists doing the theorizing? Advertisers doing word searches? Might not “tracking the e-mailing and word usage patterns” be a good tool for journalists to think about using? Are there any journalism departments out there teaching anything about applied content analysis? It appears so. At least Mark Miller, formerly of the University of Tennessee, was doing so a decade ago. And there are some other interesting attempts, here and here by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. But it appears nothing as methodologically sophisticated as that carried out by the computer scientists and political scientists is being done by journalists.
Last week, NOAA predicated a serious hurricane season a'comin' in the Atlantic, which has implications for the entire U.S. East Coast. That's last week's news, but if one lives in California, Mexico, Central America or Japan, then today there's always the possibility of a major shaker. And those are just risks imposed by nature. Modeling these and other hazards of life is the mission of RMS, a fascinating California company demonstrating innovative thinking and analytic tools.
“RMS brings together a unique, multidisciplinary team of experts to create solutions for its clients’ natural hazard and financial risk management challenges. We are the technical leader in our market, with over 100 engineers and scientists devoted to the development of risk models. Of this number, approximately fifty percent hold advanced degrees in their field of expertise.
Our specialists track research among leading experts and academic institutions worldwide, and supplement this knowledge with internal R&D to ensure that our models provide the most complete and accurate quantification of risk.”
Yup — our kind of guys. Examples of the output of these “risk models” can be found here. Of special interest to U.S. journalists are the Catastrophe Risk maps. (They are a bit too small to read in detail, but big enough to get the gist of some of the RMS product.)
We hope to report more next week about RMS, how it does what it does and how there might be some synergy there for analytic journalists.
Here at the IAJ we believe one of the reasons people come to newspapers or broadcast stations is to get the data which, upon analysis, they can turn into information that helps them make decisions. Ergo, the more meaningful data a journalistic institution can provide, the greater value that institution has for a community. A good example arrived today thanks to Tara Calishain, creator of ResearchBuzz. She writes: ** Getcher Cheap Gas Prices on Google Maps <http://www.researchbuzz.org/getcher_cheap_gas_prices_on_google_maps.shtml> “Remember when I was saying that I would love a Gasbuddy / Google Maps mashups that showed cheap gas prices along a trip route? Turns out somebody has already done it — well, sorta. You can specify a state, city (only selected cities are available) and whether you're looking for regular or diesel fuel. Check it out at http://www.ahding.com/cheapgas/ “
The data driving the map is ginned up by GasBuddy.com It's not clear how or why GasBuddy gets its data, but it offers some story potential for journalists and data for news researchers. It has an interesting link to dynamic graphs of gas prices over time.
Surely the promotion department of some news organization could grab onto this tool, tweak it a bit, promote the hell out of it, and drive some traffic to and build loyalty for the organization's web site.
That's the obvious angle, but what if some enterprising journo started to ask some questions of the data underlying the map? What's the range in gas prices in our town/state? (In Albuquerque today, the range was from $2.04 to $2.28.) Are there any demographic or traffic flow match-ups to that price range? How 'bout the variance by brand?
Would readers appreciate this sort of data? We think so, especially if there was an online sign-up and the news provider would deliver the changing price info via e-mail or IM much like Travelocity tells us when airline ticket prices change by TK dollars.
The power of good infographics is that they can greatly aid in the upstream aspects of journalism — providing insight for journalists to understand what's happening with a particular phenomena — and then downstream, to help journalists tell the story and for the audience to understand it. The Digital Revolution has upped the ante far beyond what good ol' Leonardo was using and envisioning. One of the innovators in today's datasphere is Alexander Tsiaras. A recent story in Digital Journal has this to say about Tsiaras's company, Anatomical Travelogue: “Digital Journal — At ideaCity04, one presenter was so overflowing with information that host Moses Znaimer had to enter stage right and patiently sit beside him, a silent reminder to wrap it up. But you couldn’t ask Alexander Tsiaras to gloss over the wonders of the human body, from blood flow to cell mutation.
During his presentation, he showed images from his visualization software company Anatomical Travelogue, whose clients include Nike, Pfizer and Time Inc. Tsiaras and his 25 employees take data from MRI scans, spiral CT scans and other medical imaging technologies, and use them to create scientifically accurate 3D pictures and animations.
In 2003, his book of images of fetal development, From Conception to Birth, sold 150,000 copies and his latest work is Part Two of this fantastic voyage, The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman. For a chapter on sex, Tsiaras even scanned an employee doing the deed with his girlfriend — all in the name of science.”
Matt Ericson, the top-flight map/infographics journalist/designer at The New York Times, produced another fine piece of work Tuesday related to changes in the Roman Catholic world. But what we get in print is superior [click here to see IoP version] to the online version of the cartogram (i.e. proportional map), which illustrates how the church has grown in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The print page positions the RC world c. 1900 right next to the RC population c. 2005. Readers' eyes can quickly shift from one region to the other and see the differences. On the other hand, the online treatment of those graphics, while supplying data for three different eras — 1900, 1978, 2005 — bring up each era individually, making it difficult to compare one to the others. Snazzy presentation, but at a loss of comprehension. Go to NYT story “Third World Represeents a New Factor in Pope's Succession” and click on the right column link for “Interactive: After John Paul II.” Then, after the java window pops up, click on “Changes in Catholics.”
Elliott Parker, and the Journet listserv, tips us to a NewScientist.com report…. “Governments and big business like to indulge in media spin, and that means knowing what is being said about them. But finding out is becoming ever more difficult, with thousands of news outlets, websites and blogs to monitor. “Now a British company is about to launch a software program that can automatically gauge the tone of any electronic document. It can tell whether a newspaper article is reporting a political party’s policy in a positive or negative light, for instance, or whether an online review is praising a product or damning it. Welcome to the automation of PR. ” http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7210&feedId=online-news_rss20)–at Interesting perhaps in its nuance, but hardly new in concept. Here at the IAJ we've long been impressed with the work done at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory around “information visualization.” “Information Visualization is the direct visualization of a representation of selected features or elements of complex multi-dimensional data. Data that can be used to create a visualization includes text, image data, sound, voice, video – and of course, all kinds of numerical data.” See http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/about.html and http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/technologies.html
Xcelsius does magical things for your Excel spreadsheets. It turns the numeric data into controlable Flash charts, which can be standalone “movies,” imported into PowerPoint or sent to colleagues as click-and-manipulate e-mail. Check out the Quicktime demos at http://www.infommersion.com/demos.html
This Gallery of Data Visualization displays some examples of the Best and Worst of Statistical Graphics, with the view that the contrast may be useful, inform current practice, and provide some pointers to both historical and current work. We go from what is arguably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, to the current record-holder for the worst. See http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/
Media Matters for America points out a bogus use of bar charts by CNN. Yes, the scale and base line DO matter. See http://mediamatters.org/items/200503220005 Update: CNN corrected its chart.
