Category: Visual Storytelling
Ping and prod
David McCandless is justifiably famous for his work at Information is Beautiful but as his bio on the TED website says, his “genius is not so much in finding jazzy new ways to show data [...] but in finding fresh ways to combine datasets to let them ping and prod each other.”
With free tools such as Many Eyes and Tableau it’s becoming easier and easier to visualise data (though making it look beautiful is another matter).
The real challenge now is in finding and curating data to tell a new, compelling story.
Visualising the developing world
This TED talk by Hans Rosling is an excellent example of how powerful data and good story telling can explain more in 20 minutes than words, photos, multimedia or video could ever hope too. Hans uses data with the Gapminder system in a presentation to burst myths about the developing world and prove that the developing world is not who you think it is.
When a news story is centred around a list, it’s hard to make your coverage stand out. That’s the problem we faced when Triple J ran their Hottest 100 of All Time earlier this year. Given everyone had the same list of one hundred songs, how do you add your own angle?
A great introduction
Khoi Vinh has linked to a great redesign walkthrough of the new NPR.org site. It is a beautiful piece of video that proves that even somthing like an introduction to a redesign can have a nice narrated story.
We all know that data can tell different stories depending on how you spin it and the way data is visually represented can lead to assumptions by the viewer.
Google have kept pushing ahead in their mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” this time with visualisations of datasets in their search results pages.
With Swine flu so prevalent in the world news at the moment, its only natural that there be some maps featured on news sites telling how the virus has spread across the globe.