Dataviz of the Week: Show, Don’t Tell

This is the most remarkable resume I’ve ever seen.

Talk about the-medium-is-the-message. Marshal McLuhan should be thrumming happily in his grave like a turbine.

Note how this compares to the home page of reigning datavisualist demi-god Edward Tufte, whose bio appears about three screens down, stacked below several sedimentary layers of seminar promotion. Granted Tufte is a demi-god whose acolytes follow him around like Photoshop Deadheads, so doesn’t need to work that hard to sell himself. But still.

I often yammer about how infographics can convey more information–can tell a story–better than prose.

Compare Anderson’s self-presentation to a conventional resume’s gray blocks of letters that most of his peers depend on. It’s clear which document makes a better argument for hiring Michael Anderson.

Maybe before you hire Edward Tufte?

Update: I poked around Anderson’s site and found his old-school PDF resume. It sucks. Sucks wind. Hot, tornadic wind. Dude: What’s with the cursive font? Who the hell would hire you for an infographics job?

#Neda and the Power of the Viral Image

The 37-second amateur video that shows, in vivid and horrifying detail, a young woman named Neda dying of a gunshot wound on the streets of Tehran, has the capacity to change the political dynamic in Iran. It may already have done so.

I will not link to the video here. The decision to watch it should be made carefully, knowing it is sickening and likely to remain with you for the rest of your life. You can easily find it if you want.

I found it nearly overwhelming. I had to step away from the computer and gather myself. Afterward when describing it to my wife my voice was shaking and I couldn’t quite formulate my thoughts.

The morning after viewing it I can say this: I believe that 37 second clip can transform global opinion.

I liken it to the 1972 photograph of the young Vietnamese girl running naked through the streets, her skin seared by the chemical burn of napalm. Or the 1963 picture of police dogs attacking civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama. Both, it is argued, played a key role in galvanizing public opinion on the political issues they represented.

For me, and I suspect many who view it, the Neda video says with absolute clarity: The violent crackdown on street protesters in Tehran must not stand. The perpetrators must be stopped or removed.

It removes any ambivalence or subtlety one might have about the situation there.

Last night I was actually wondering how a government responsible for Neda’s death–in an environment where cheap, instant, global, many-to-many communications has brought the phrase “the whole world is watching” closer to literal fact than it was in the 1960s–can possibly remain in power.

In the cool light of morning I realize that was dramatic hyperbole, heavily colored by emotion.

But still: That 37-second video has already become a singular, powerful fact driving  global opinion. Its impact will only accelerate and expand. It will have consequences.

Let me also predict that the mainstream media is going to miss the import of that video. Partly because they dare not show it, and thus it will not become part of their newsrooms’ collective consciousness–or conscience.

But also because they still tend to view amateur, viral “reporting” as marginal “bonus” material, incapable of driving public thought in the way their own professional reporting and opinionating can.

There is a #Neda hashtag on Twitter. It captures conversations about and inspired by the video.

Yet it is now being added as a hashtag to general Twitterizing on the election protests, as an  expression of commitment at least as powerful as the green avatars that hover like nauseated witnesses over the 140-character global thoughtstream.

Much is made about Twitter and its limited ability to drive change.

This isn’t about that.

It’s about the power of a single, brief incident captured on video–in an  environment where people share what moves them instantly with a global audience, without the assistance or approval of governments, media or any institution—to change others’ minds.

Change the world?

In the cool light of morning, I realize that’s foolish too.

But if you are feeling strong and brave and willing to have a horrifying image seared into your brain, view the video.

It will change you.

Digital News Innovation from. . .the Washington Post!

Enthusiasts of innovative ways to present news in web-native formats should check out the Innovations in News blog from…The Washington Post.

Regular readers of this blog [both of you!] may be surprised to hear this. I’m a regular reader myself, and nobody is more surprised than I.

Having issued a blistering broadside against the Post‘s [my former employer's] inept lunge at web-native storytelling last week, I had no idea that the Post was quietly accumulating some good digital news projects and aggregating them in a blog. It’s been published since mid-April.

Here’s the most news-oriented project of the items of the bunch, a wonderful D.C. Budget Game. It’s an interactive response to the old “You don’t like the budget cuts? You give it a try” dare.

In truth, aside from this, there’s little groundbreaking work here yet–most of the five features on the blog are soft efforts, of the cool-stuff-apropos-of-nothing variety, not journalistic responses to the news. The Post still badly trails the New York Times in innovative use of digital media to commit acts of journalism.

Still, it’s a sign of digital  life. And worth keeping an eye on.

n.b. Nobody at the Post turned me on to this. It’s not a “make-good” blog entry to try to curry favor with my former employer. It’s safe to say that that favor is beyond curry.

Tufte Gone Wild ™: Debate Graph

And now a new feature of this blog: Tufte Gone Wild ™.*

This refers, as some of you may know, to the work of Edward Tufte, the reigning master of data visualization. He has inspired and taught a generation of designers and journalists to tell stories and explain the world with graphics. Tufte is a cult figure in the field who travels the world hosting seminars for communications professionals, some of whom are regulars, sort of like Deadheads with Photoshop.

And yet: Since Tufte arrived on the scene, graphics have been put in motion, via Flash and other web technologies, raising the bar for visual presentation of data. By inviting users to parse and rearrange information, interactive visualizations have the capacity to teach even more than a “dead” image, invite original understandings and permit users to add and manipulate data. It’s exciting stuff.

And so here on this blog I’ll occasionally nod to interactive visualizations that aspire to Tuftian clarity but have the additional dimension of interactivity.

First up is DebateGraph, a bit plain to look at but a fascinating demonstration of how interactive graphics can explain, and invite participation, in the sort of issue debates that usually are carried out via articles, essays and speeches. It reveals, in ways I haven’t seen before, how ideas relate to each other in a variety of dimensions.

Here’s an example of a graph that explores drivers of the global financial crisis. Note how in this presentation I’ve put “human cognitive biases” at the center. You can choose other ideas as the focus, which then brings in and aligns other ideas that relate to that central concept.

What’s cool here: This tool lets you “see” and engage with ideas, and explore their inter-relationships, very elegantly. Ink-and-paper, or even a dead online graphic, does not invites, or even permit, this kind of thinking. The Debate Graph also invites users to add content and extend the argument.

Current topics include:

• What should Obama do next?
• Climate change
• Intelligent design [is this really a legitimate argument, or a political ruse?]
• Flash vs. Ajax [!]
• To be or not to be [a fun mapping out of Hamlet's existential dilemma]

So far, DebateGraph is mainly used as a publishing platform. It doesn’t appear too many people have used its wiki functions to extend the content.

I hope the project gets some publicity and participation. The idea of “visual” policy arguments deserves some exploration by thinkers professional and amateur.

Even if, in the end, the action doesn’t turn out to be “wild.”

* The ™ is a joke, of course. I suspect I’ll get a cease-and-desist order from Graphics Press LLC, Tufte’s company, very soon. I’ll keep you posted.

The Weekest Links: Nuke.com, Google Air, Twitter Surgery

If it’s Friday it’s time to sift through the dustpan of another amazing, amusing and alarming week on the Interwebs. . .

1. Ground Zero

A Google maplett that lets you select a munition and a type of nuclear weapon and see what sort of “thermal damage” it might do to the target area. Frighteningly, the destruction rendered by the blast of “Little Boy” [Hiroshima] seems. . .well, not all that bad relative to today’s weapons. Or an asteroid. [h/t Very Short List]

2. Air Force Live

A public affairs arm of the USAF has a modest news-and-info blog on that operates on. . .Blogger! Say, is this another one of those Google-inside-deals-with-the-government things? If federal offices start using Orkut to “create citizen communities,” we’ll know something really stinks.

. . .and finally, our regular sighting of the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse ™:

3. Live-Tweeting Surgery

The captions appearing in the “comments” under this photo, which depicts Henry Ford Health System surgeons describing the action and taking questions, are priceless. Favorite: “At least they’re not searching Wikipedia.” [n.b. While the docs pictured above were scrubbed in, neither was the "primary" surgeon.]

Tropicana’s Orange State Twitter Strategy

What an incredible. . .thing New Media Strategies, a Washington, D.C. digital marketing firm, has created for Tropicana, the orange juice brand.

It’s called An Orange America.

The. . .thing displays an aggregation of Twitter updates about either John McCain or Barack Obama, visually indicating in blue or red which terms are linked more frequently to each candidate. Click on the words across the bottom, and arcs illustrate how each term is connected to others.

It’s hypnotic, in that high-nerd kind of way.

Two observations:

1. It’s an aggressively unexpected branding venture for an orange juice company. It’s all a stretch: the “We’re not red, we’re not blue, we’re 100 percent orange” slogan. . . the “squeezing” of “fresh” Tweets. . .the idea that the conceptual connections so vividly illustrated are meaningful. [What, for instance, does it mean that there is such frequent use in Obama-centric Tweets of the words "Biden" and "Pray"?]

You can just imagine the suits at PepsiCo who haven’t been in on the fun seeing this and going “WTF?????? How does this help us move more units of Low-Pulp in Q4? Minute-Maid is killing us with those in-store promotions!”

2. And yet: Viewed holistically, An Orange America conveys the impression that Tropicana is alert, progressive and in touch with emerging cultural forces–a significant shift from what you’d normally think about a mass marketer of juice products or its PepsiCo corporate overlords.

I think it’s great to see companies doing odd and wonderful things with social media.

The use of this stuff by big companies is still immature (by which I mean in early development, not juvenile. Although it’s sometimes that too).

It’s inspiring to see the sort of creative mojo behind this thing coming from a marketing agency.

I’m guessing An Orange America didn’t cost much to develop–a fast, inspired job flipped against the wall to see if it sticks. A wing, a prayer and a fast sign-off.

How any of this relates to the core mission of moving the aforementioned units of Low-Pulp OJ is a question I leave to others.

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