Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Our friend Marylaine Block once again delivers some insights directly applicable to analytic journalism. See the piece below where she explains why visual statistics and infographics are essential to what we're doing (or trying to do).
Just received a reference to this gallery of network visualizations. The site is new to me, but perhaps not to all of you. http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/index.cfm
Be sure to drill down in the “About” link for additional riches. There are hints of potential here but for the fact that much of the design is in the ever-so-cool black and gray, which means it's a chore to extract any meaning. ___________________________________________________
Goal VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.
Not all projects shown here are genuine complex networks, in the sense that they aren’t necessarily at the edge of chaos, or show an irregular and systematic degree of connectivity. However, the projects that apparently skip this class were chosen for two important reasons. They either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject. Nevertheless, all projects have one trait in common: the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.
How it started
The idea for this endeavor started on my second year MFA program at Parsons School of Design. During this period I conducted extensive research on the visualization of complex networks, which culminated with my thesis project Blogviz: Mapping the dynamics of information diffusion in Blogspace. One thing I found while exploring this area was the lack of an integrated and extensive resource on this subject. This is the main reason why this project came to life.
Later on, as a teaching assistant of Information Architecture at Parsons Design+Technology program, together with Christopher Kirwan, I was able to consolidate most of this research as part of an independent study. The key chunk of projects shown here was gathered during this phase. My ultimate goal is to keep adding new projects to a still undetermined limit.
Matt Ericson of the NYTimes has delivered yet again a piece of superb infographics. This one, sadly, illustrates the 2000+ U.S. deaths in Iraq. (See “Deaths in Iraq by Month” in the 26 Oct. 2005 story “2,000 Dead: As Iraq Tours Stretch On, a Grim Mark“) William Playfair (1759-1823) was the Scottish engineer and political economist who did the ground-breaking work in visual statistics. Charles Joseph Minard, in the mid-nineteenth century, produced the classic infographic of Napoleon's March to (and retreat from) Moscow. Minard's great work is notable for displaying multiple data sets on a timeline as well as their geographical relationships.
Ericson has done something similar by showing the combat deaths in Iraq from the March 2003 invasion until mid-Oct. 2005 as the occupation continues. Ericson shows not just the numbers, but the branch of service, the locations of the deaths and the causes of death (i.e. explosive devices, vehicle or plane crashes, etc.).
It's a brilliant piece of work that also demonstrates the added value that very good journalists and their editors can bring to what should be public discussion. But this kind of work doesn't happen overnight, nor is it cheap to do. (Are you listening Knight-Ridder, Gannett, et al.?)
We would only hope that someone at the Times would work to develop a flash program/presentation that would, in a relatively automatic mannter, constantly update this important informational display.
The concept of Power Law distributions is attracting growing interest, especially among folks in the Complexity and Complex Adaptive Systems communities. For journalists, some of the math involved is somewhat more complex than the elementary descriptive statistics we deal with, but it's not that tough to grasp the implications of research probing Power Laws as they apply to various phenomena.
Here's a perspective on global warfare that might prompt some deep contemplation for journalists.
Original source: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2005/09/wars_new_equili.html
“In technology, particularly in information based systems, advances can occur almost overnight. This likely applies to warfare as it becomes more information-based. As in technology, patterns and methods of warfare tend to stay within bounded equilibria depending on the type of war being fought. When an improvement arrives, the equilibrium point changes and warfare undergoes a rapid shift.
One of the ways to measure a equilibrium point was first demonstrated by Lewis Richardson over 50 years ago. He calculated that the distribution of casualties in conventional wars follow a power law distribution. Updates to his work show that this pattern of distribution continues to hold.
In a new paper by Johnson, Spagat, and others called “From Old Wars to New Wars and Global Terrorism,” ( PDF) — http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/physics/0506213/ — the authors demonstrate that a new pattern of war is emerging. To do this, they analyzed the frequency-intensity distributions of wars (including terrorism) and examined their power law curves. They found that conventional wars had a power law exponent of 1.8. An analysis of terrorism since 1968 found that the exponents were 1.71 (for G7 countries) and 2.5 (for non-G7 countries). This makes sense, conventional wars and G7 terrorism are both characterized by periods of relative non-activity followed by high casualty events (highly orchestrated battles). Non-G7 terrorism is a more decentralized and ad hoc type of warfare characterized by numerous small engagements and fewer large casualty events.
Here's where the analysis gets interesting. When the author's examined the data from Colombia and Iraq, they found that both wars evolved towards the coefficient for non-G7 terrorism (although from different directions). This finding doesn't fit the prevailing theories of warfare. A conventional understanding of fourth generation warfare , such the one posited by Thomas Hammes in the Sling and the Stone posit that 4th generation warfare began in earnest with Mao. However, within Mao's formulation (and Ho Chi Minh's variant), guerrilla wars are but a prelude to conventional war to seize control of the state. The power law for these wars should, based on this theory, tend towards the coefficient we see for conventional wars. In fact, we see the opposite. Guerrilla wars in both Colombia and Iraq have stabilized at a coefficient far from conventional warfare.
This has broad implications for 4th generation warfare theory — which clearly dominated the types of wars we saw in the latter half of the twentieth century. The patterns of conflict we see today in Colombia and Iraq are a break from the previous framework (which may be an example of punctuated equilibrium). Unlike the previous models of guerrilla wars which sought to replace the state, these new wars have moved to a level of decentralization that makes them both unable to replace the state and extremely hard to eliminate. Is this new evolutionary equilibrium a fifth generation of warfare? It is extremely likely. This new form of warfare, or what I call open source warfare, is what this site (and my book) is dedicated to understanding.”
From Directions Magazine:
“Machover Associates, a computer graphics consultancy reports that the worldwide market for scientific visualization in 2D and 3D will grow from $10.7 billion in 2005 to $17.2 billion in 2010. The big money is in 3-D imaging, the majority of which comes from private industry. Still, a substantial amount of federal research funding is available as well. Geospatial technologies have a role here: one visualization film shown at Siggraph last week illustrated the 2002 Elbe River flooding and the use of geodata played in predicating the need for evacuations.“
Posted: 2 August 2005 By: Jemima Kiss
Email: jemima@journalism.co.uk
A UK firm has developed a free, innovative tool that plots breaking news by location.
Developed by Birmingham-based technology firm Daden, NewsGlobe can combine Google's geographic search engine Google Earth with the user's favourite RSS news feeds to present stories on a local, regional or international map.
The application scans headlines for keywords that identify the location of the story, and then presents them by headline with the location pinpointed. A summary of the story appears when the user hovers over the text and they can click through to the full story on the original news site.
The popularity of RSS news feeds and projects such as BBC Backstage has triggered a wave of creative RSS-based tools from the web developing community, said Daden's managing director David Burden.
BBC Backstage was launched in May and encourages developers to use selected BBC content and software to create new applications. Recent contributions to the project have been a Flash-based news reader program and traffic maps.
“There has been an explosion of activity in the past four to five months driven by RSS,” said Mr Burden.
“Developers are exploring the possibilities of moving information from one format to another; this application simply uses Google Earth as a news aggregator.”
As well as providing a geographical view of breaking news, the application has interesting commercial possibilities for companies with specific or wide ranging regional interests such as estate agents or billboard advertisers.
To use NewsGlobe, web users must have Google Earth installed. More information is available on Daden's website.
We have long-enjoyed — and learned from — Chance News, published by the good folks in the math dept. at some Eastern school in the wilds of the far, far north. The current issue has an interesting link to some paper related to “modeling conflict.” See: http://chance.dartmouth.edu/chancewiki/index.php/Rules_of_engagement_-_modelling_conflict
Check out “Mapping Hacks,” a new book on the O'reilly list by Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, Jo Walsh . “Mapping Hacks is a collection of one hundred simple techniques available to developers and power users who want to draw digital maps. You'll learn where to find the best sources of geographic data and then how to integrate that data into your own creations. With so many industrial-strength tips and tools, Mapping Hacks effectively takes the sting out of digital mapmaking.”
Measuring risk is one of the topics/disciplines that analytic journalists track. Those folks have multiple methodologies that we can apply, and this one takes a mapping approach. Recently, super-researcher Gary Price, of “ResourceShelf,” pointed us to this: “Filmmaking–Risks–Map Source: AON 2005 Risks in Global Filmmaking Map “Every filmmaker, from major studios to independent producers, experiences some element of risk while filming in foreign countries. That is why, each year, Aon/Albert G Ruben, the largest entertainment insurance broker in the world, comprehensively measures and maps the risks filmmakers face across the globe. The 2005 Risks in Global Filmmaking Map measures crime, corruption, kidnap and ransom, disease and medical care risks, and references terrorism and political risks.” Direct LINK to These ResourceShelf Posts http://digbig.com/4dqyn
Steven Roth was one of those guys who could see farther than most of us and, even more rare, make that vision a reality. He died in his sleep this past weekend in his home near Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obit sub-hed: “One of the pioneers in field of 'information visualization' a 'reluctant manager' http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05165/521102.stm Roth was a founder of Maya Viz Ldt., one of the more interesting firms to emerge from the Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in the 1990s. Maya Viz took infographics to higher levels of graphic clarity and data interaction.
“Described as 'dreamer,' a 'visionary' and most often, 'incredibly passionate' by his colleagues, Mr. Roth was probably best known for his oft-spoken desire to 'change the world' by developing software that allowed complex data and numerical information to be represented graphically, and in a way that humans could better see, use and manipulate it.”
