50 Years of U.S. Government Spending

And here's another slope graph, this time on government spending. I think this one works a bit better than the previous one. It's clearer that there's a progression from one point to another. 

You can read a bit more about these numbers here.

Update: Wowsers! People love Tufte's approach to data visualization. This graphic was shared more than 10,000 times on Facebook.

Evolution of an Infographic: What America Buys

So, I've re-entered the realm of making data look pretty and informative, after spending the past few years in the realm of video. The two things that have been pretty interesting:

1.) There's plenty of data out there, just never the kind of data set you want. Getting that data set takes a lot of phone calls and pestering people.

2.) There's a lot of thought that goes into the clear and good communication of information. And sometimes your favorite graphic will be cut.

That's what happened here.



We had ranked the left-hand column in order of size (with the exception of the amorphous category of 'other') and kept that order for the left column for easier comparison.

But I was a little worried that the changes of our spending would get lost in that comparison. The graphic would force people to read the individual numbers to compare the hierarchy of spending in 1949 and today.

So we tried to visualize the changes in spending in a Tuftean way, using his lesser known model of slopegraphs.

That was a little too minimalist and somewhat confusing. 

The combination of both approaches (and my personal favorite) is shown below: 

All in all, it took us two other, prettier and perhaps more confusing graphics to get back to our original one. We had a vote among colleagues and they voted for the very first bar chart.

Update: later the third version of the graphic became a very useful way to tell stories of change over time. My editor gave a different version of the same graphic-combo a greenlight, which now has become a regular data visualization we use.

Lessons Learned: I Need a Slideshow, a Video, an Infographic...

As a multimedia reporter, it's important to familiarize yourself with the different kinds of media there are and what their strengths are. There are stories that are more visual, others that lend themselves more to graphics. Sometimes picking and choosing the right medium for the right story is a better approach than to have 'everything' for every story. Here's a short breakdown of what I gathered from lectures, readings and concluded from my own observations:

The categories:
Infographics:

One of their main strengths is that they can deliver an instantaneous understanding of large sets of data, i.e. convey the larger context of a story. A line graph can show rise in prices over time faster and more effectively than can a paragraph that describes numbers. A color-coded heat map that shows higher percentages of a certain ethnic population can be better at explaining racial diversity in New York than a paragraph detailing the breakdown of every neighborhood. How-It-Works float charts are probably better at showing the mechanics of a process than a lengthy essay.

Interactive graphics:

Interactive graphics give another dimension to infographics. Interactivity adds the ability to hide information until a user prompts it and to create a multi-layered experience of information consumption. It also allows for heightened user engagement, too: be it through user submissions, continuous linkage (allowing for users to continue exploring). So if a data and information-driven story is particularly complicated, interactivity allows the journalist to stagger the amount of information presented. It allows to show correlations and give detail only if a viewer wants it.

Video and slideshows:

Visual storytelling is best used for personable approach to a story and at its best can show a larger story through a characters’ story. If done well, characters are often emblematic of the larger issues at hand: it's a way of humanizing the consequences of a new law; of showing a trend story through a character that exemplifies that trend; or even just to show a component human nature through the ups and downs of the story of one or a few people. Also think about what would best be SEEN rather than DESCRIBED in words (these are often action-driven or event-driven pieces).

Interaction of those components:

These components can also interact with one another. Some have employed flash and javascript to lay out a story like an online magazine, except that the photos and graphics that punctuated the pages of a magazine now move. We are now able to use flash, javascript and other software/programming languages to curate our elements, adding another layer of information. An information graphic could be used as a navigation for a number of video components, for example.

I often use the 'template' of a print story to explain the examples above. In a written feature the formula goes like so:

1.) Anecdotal lede: starting with a person that exemplifies your story

2.) Nutgraf: What's the story about

3.) Context graf: This part often gives the numerical significance of the story, a la "she is one of thousands of people who have..."

And then it alters from going back and forth between characters, experts and analytical paragraphs.

One could look at a video as a drawn out anecdotal lede and data graphics as extensive context paragraphs. Just in a different medium.

My Moleskin

I was always a tedious note taker.

I like highlighters in different colors, red pens that I alternate with black pens. I like .75 ball pens because it's more fun to write with them than with the .50 ones.

Bullet points were a great way for me to think about subjects, even essays. I always called it my German urge for order.

It's kind of funny to think that that is how I process the death of first my grandmother and now the imminent exitus of my grandfather.

I'm making it into a project, a step-by-step visualization of what started out as an essay about my granny's funeral and is now a clumsy attempt to understand my identity via genealogy.

I've sent out an excel sheet for my family to fill out and it fills me with joy.

The power of data and the need for aggregation

The New York Times published an article yesterday about how statisticians are quite hot (i.e. in demand) these days. That's cause the almighty organism called Internet and other machinery help us gather a ton of data. And now we're not quite sure how to deal with it. This calls for the aggregation, visualization and compartmentalization of an ocean of figures, numerics and letters:

“We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business. “But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.”

Why this gets me so giddy, I don't know. But I feel as if it opens up a whole other realm of playfulness with conveying information, using spiders, graphical imagery and interactivity.

I guess, some webby folks have already understood and found a way of visualizing the power of data. Jonathan Harris, one very inspiring net artist, has done so in various of his projects, one of my favorite being We Feel Fine.

The project does this:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling".

It's a small supernova of colorful dots that signify emotions. You can sort them. You can look at the individual entries. It's a lovely way of gauging moods on the internet.

Here a video lecture by the artist on TED:

Now I just need to learn programming.

One-(wo)man-band

My job is to be a videographer. Translated from jargon-heavy web lingo to everyday speech this means I shoot, edit and script videos and one day possibly even slideshows. 

Whenever I pitch a story package, however, I extend my job description. 

One-(wo)man-band. 

The problem with this is not that you have to suddenly present a story in three different formats. That's just having to juggle different software and taking into account a lot of production time. What killed me was that I realized (possibly too late) I had to report on three stories about the same theme with slightly different angles. You see, components have to complement not re-iterate. And that's where it got icky. 

So here are a few lessons I've learned from this and I hope some of you will find it useful:

1. Preparations: The key to all of this seems to be pre-reporting. Finding your story angle for the print piece in advance will help loads. So once you've got that pinned you can see what's missing or under-explored. The misconception I had was that I could predict which part would play which role. I thought I knew in advance what I would need for each component. But interviews always change your angle on the story, ever so slightly. Hence, figure out the print component. Then the additional components will crystalize when you realize which parts you weren't able to explore in the print story and are important to get the whole picture.  
2. Material: That's a biggie. Not only does the article need a still image. The video needs about 10 images of what you couldn't get on tape while filming the office of your interviewee or visiting a space where an event took place. And the best graphics have great visualizations of data you need to get from your source or have crisp and beautiful images that are cut out or processed in one or another way. So a grocery list while reporting multimedia-style might be: a few photos (for article), images from things your interviewee talking about (for video) and illustrations/3D models/powerpoint presentations/stills/data (for graphic). 
3. Time: Unless you have a team of people working with you, you might want to do this sort of reporting only for enterprise stories.

Suggestions and comments welcome!

The new role of the image...?

Someone talked to me recently, told me that it'd take very long to take a great shot. You wake up before dawn, he said, you go on top of a tall building, talk your way in, if you have to. Or you schlepp yourself from street to street, the body of your camera dangling off your neck, the strap grinding its way to your bladebone. A quasimodo-to-be, ten years from now. Or you swarm around troublemakers, a parasite digging invisible, needle-like arms into the open pores of their subject/object. 

You get the right angle, turn a little wheel on your camera, correct your lighting, click, you got your shot. 

It sounds like an idealist's ode to the photojournalist. And yes, there seem to be a few great photographers out there, who seem to be able to live for a month on one photo's earnings. 

But the viewer clicks on. To photo slideshows, photo series, photos tagged in albums, to interactive maps and graphics. And so a photographer either goes on a scavenger hunt for the next interactive map, running from one building/person/event to the next; or has to take mug shots of 50 people who give representative opinions, Man-On-The-Street polls on the elections, Britney Spears, Detergent; or is s/he is one of 40 random photographers who work for Getty Images, the AP, Reuters, Corbis, who contribute namelessly to a larger project. 

It slaps the photog ego in the face, which is sort of satisfactory to me. It takes away from Walter Benjamin's prediction that photography politicizes/is inherently politicized due to its fake objectivity, its need for a verbal framing. Now the multimedia framing negates its singularity. Takes away from its wordlessness. Contextualizes the photograph for the consumer, while s/he is just as capable of re-contextualizing the image through posting it on facebook/blogger.  The image has become a free-floating currency. The iconic image mutates into a malleable (both in size and meaning) broche, worn, traded, bought, lost, sold. And it loses its charisma, or to use Benjamin's vocabulary, its aura, once more. 

Learning about visual vocabulary

As nerdy as it sounds, my favorite class this semester has been Graphics in the Newsroom with Hannah Fairfield, a New York Times information graphic illustrator. And hey, seeing that the infographic has made a big comeback thanks to the internet, I am maybe even right in thinking that this skill might make me that much more employable in the world of journalism.

We've had a guest lecturer with the almost aristocratic name Bradford Paley come in to speak to us. His work is currently rubbing frames with that of Flash God Jonathan Harris and other computer graphic designers at the MoMA's "Design and Elastic Mind" exhibition and exhibits quite a different approach to reading of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland .

So the question is: Who the eff cares about a bunch of colorful lines that tie togther words used in Caroll's drug-glorifying fairy tale? Well, how many literature and creative writing majors are there in the world who've gotten stupidly excited about interpreting the written words of their idols?














Let's back up: Mr. Paley's Text Arc is a visual representation of the occurence and frequency of each word used in Alice in Wonderland. The round frame of the image is made of the entire text of the book. The words inside the cirlce are sized according to occurence frequency (the more often the words appear the larger they are) and are placed onto the graph according to how often they appear at that point in the book. It's almost like elastic bands that stretch throughout the circular layout of the text pulling each word a certain direction.


The most interesting part about this is that the word "Queen" for instance appears at several points in the book before she even appears in person in the fictional storyline. The word in the Text Arc is positioned very close to where she actually appears as Carroll uses the word "Queen" more often when she is actually present in the plot. But the red strings show you where else in the book the Queen has been mentioned and shows how Carroll foreshadows the Queen's final appearance throughout the entire book.

Visual languages

Now that in itself might be nice and gimmicky, but what I found 'stupidly exciting' about this was that Paley created this visual vocabulary or information narrative structure which takes advantage of instant visual recognition of patterns. True, the structure is like Hebrew to a native Chinese speaker at first and has to be learned. But once you get what exactly he's visualizing, basically once you learn how to read this sucker, you can quickly pick up patterns within the data.

We learn how to read bar charts and line charts and by interpreting them formulate certain hypotheses about what this data could mean. Immediate visual impressions give the viewer the opportunity to concentrate on understanding the larger meaning of a complex set of data, rather than get lost in processing invidual words, numbers, etc. And while that is nothing new, Mr. Paley's Text Arc gives you the opportunity to apply this generally numerically driven concept of information visualization to a freaking book. Powerpower!

Anyhow.
Nerdy end to a very long day.
Narf.

Multimedia musings that seem outdated now

Conceiving a multimedia project is quite the challenge but encourages you to really go nuts with the tools at hand. A white screen is what you have at the beginning and with Adobe Flash, there is almost no limit to your creativity.

This degree really gave us the time to explore various questions that I've heard reiterated in larger newsrooms here and abroad: What the heck do I put in a video; how do I best convey numbers and who still cares about words?

So here are some lessons worth $50k in tuition fees and a lot of sleepless nights in a smelly computer lab: Text matters cause most net media consumers are bored office workers who love to procrastinate around lunch time (when the number of site viewers peak) and they don't want to be caught by their bosses combatting their boreout. Text is still the most effective way for getting you information quickly.

Videos are often not consumed in their entirety for the same reasons but are generally more powerful when it comes to telling more individualized stories. Slideshows are a little work-friendlier. Clicking away on the internet - from afar that looks like clicking away on a excel sheet, right?

And Interactivity. What can I say. Over the past year, I have fallen in love with Adobe Flash. The Flashplayer, that thing you have to download from the Adobe homepage when you're on an old, old PC, is what makes things beam in, move from left to right or click around on maps, photo galleries, etc.

Interactivity, if done properly, draws in a lot of people. Big time. Maybe not for longer than 30 seconds, but as the Internet is seen more and more as a resource to personalize and filter information according to one's own taste, the interactive feature that combines a lot of useful/interesting information with a compelling and easy-to-understand design wins. The LA Times did a crimewatch interactive (google map AIP), recording each murder that happened in Los Angeles. This data base is constantly updated and sorted by name, I presume daily. This lends it longevity that videos or slideshows might not have. Constantly upgraded, constantly renewed data.

To end on a good note:
http://www.wefeelfine.org/