When will blogs start presenting data using interactive visuals alongside their stories?
June 1st, 2008The New York Times does a great job presenting interactive visual displays of data alongside the newspaper’s stories. For a story profiling Tiger Wood’s golf game, here’s the interactive display of how Tiger Woods wins majors. For a story on inflation here’s the interactive display showing how Americans spend their money and how that’s effected by inflation.
As Hans Rosling has shown, the proper visual presentation of facts can be illuminating, reforming opinions in a way that pure text often can’t do.
When will websites beyond the NY Times obtain and start to use such capabilities? It may be that displays like this only make sense when the effort put into making the data presentable is sure to reach a very broad audience, but some blogs are already reaching very large audiences. Here’s hoping more websites develop such capabilities.
June 2nd, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Good question! I just completed a class in information visualization and communication and I want to see more of this going on. Any suggestions for the casual blogger?
Maybe Google is working on this.
June 3rd, 2008 at 5:29 pm
I just came across the “2008 Campaign tool” on NYTimes (http://www.nytimes.com/). Its right front & center on the home page right now…incredible data visualization. Really brought home the fact that elections are like herding cattle…most of the white voters voted for Clinton, and all the black people voted for Obama! Data visualization indeed cuts through the bull shit and really helps facts hit home.
Nice post!
June 4th, 2008 at 1:53 am
Lynn, your suspicion is right, Google is working on better visualization of data for presentation on websites. They have two initiatives I’m aware of. The first is called Google charts. With some tinkering you can use Google to generate a chart image based on some data (see http://code.google.com/apis/chart/). The second is that they bought the gapminder presentation software that Hans Rosling used in his fantastic TED presentation (see http://www.gapminder.org/blog/gapminder-foundat...).
June 5th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
I think this is the visualization you’re referring to… very neat! http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/pol...