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?

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.

Open Government: Transparent Complexity

The federal government is really running with President Obama’s transparency mandate.

Setting aside a few controversial decisions to hold certain material back for specific reasons [torture photos, for instance], agencies are hard at the task of opening up the government to let citizens see what’s inside.

Witness the White House/National Academy of Public Administration’s Open Government Dialogue. It’s a public-private effort to figure out how to get the government to use social media technologies to increase citizen interaction.

Read the Office of Science and Technology’s blog summary of a recent effort to consolidate recent transparency-related brainstorming in order to nudge it toward action.

A complicated effort? A massive coordination challenge? You bet. Just take a look at the White House’s visual summary of the terrain that has been covered so far. This is, of course, just an excerpt.

This visual presentation of the process/output is itself much more transparency-enhancing than the companion texts, meeting notes, etc. But it illustrates this: The effort is huge and nobody should believe this is going to be easy.

An even simpler–which is to say, even more transparent–summary of recent federal transparency activities can be found at the White House’s Open Government Initiative webpage.

Check out the Innovations Gallery and the transparency timeline at the bottom of the home page.

A New View for Viewzi

My favorite “alternative” search engine, Viewzi, has debuted a new feature that merits another visit.

By my tastes, Viewzi is the best tool on the market to combine search and data visualization–two of the most important functionalities on the web. When you conduct a search using Viewzi, you can choose among 18 [!] different ways to view your search, from a visual “album gallery” of sites to the surprising, and surprisingly functional, Google Timeline view, shows results lined up in the order Brother Google first discovered them.

Viewzi tends to be more impressive as a technology platform, a sort of innovation farm for dataviz geeks.   But its new view, Power Grid, takes an important step toward usability, if not quite practicality. It lets you choose either to “see” or “read” results, and includes a handy bookmarking feature. Read more