Apr/102
Breadth Portfolio: Part 3 – Data Visualization
The last part of the series with parts of the report I made for the Multimedia Journalism module, this time about data visualization.
Experiments in Data Visualization
One of the fields I’ve been interested the most is in data journalism, and the visual representation of information. It takes two seemingly opposite mindsets to work with data: one of a statistician and the other of a designer, the analytical and the creative side by side. But I found that data, to be interesting to the audience must have one or both of these features, besides being accurate and relevant: it has to be visually compelling and/or interactive. Once again, technology comes to the rescue, and at the same time can lead us to disaster. The huge amount of tools available to organize and present data relies in different coding languages, mostly Javascript and Flash, and if we are to use live data we must know how to use APIs to direct content into our application. And even if we find a software that does it all for us, we need to know which story we’re telling.
I did some research about newspaper brand values and online traffic of Portuguese news websites, and I came across with the monthly traffic report for all of them. My goal was to understand the relative and proportional position of each one, regarding visits, page views, and how those two values relate to each other. The data I got also has portals, specialized websites, and entertainment magazines so it has a broad range of themes (all charts are available live here – http://is.gd/aZLXs)
First of all I wanted to have a general overview of the size of each one when it comes to space within the Portuguese online universe, so I went for a tree map. The view wasn’t clear enough, so I tried a different approach, using a bubble chart, highlighting just the focus of my research, which were specifically newspapers. It was a better option, and I could have done things even more interesting if I added the paper circulation data. One of the conclusions that I would have found was that best selling newspapers don’t necessarily do equally well online.
But the real risk when connecting data is to draw wrong conclusions from fact. So these are the most successful websites, looking at these data sets right? Well, maybe not. What if we try to understand who are better at engaging the audience and get more page views per visit?
The idea that I got is that we can use data visualization to find a perspective on the subject and that will lead us to a better understanding of what were just numbers on a paper.
Mar/101
Visual representations of online traffic for Portuguese news websites
I’ve been working on my assignment for the Online Journalism module, where we are supposed to experiment with different ways of presenting information. Since i was already looking into this data, i decided to try ManyEyes to produce three different charts for online traffic of Portuguese news websites.
They are not visually outstanding, but i think they convey a pretty good notion how the online universe is organized in Portugal. The three values i used were Visits, Pageviews and the relationship between those two. This first tree map shows how much space each website takes, and you can select different sets of values in the drop down menu below.
But my goal was to highlight just the most important newspapers. So i highlighted them in a bubble chart:
But what i really wanted was how to measure success. Do more visits and pageviews mean the product is more compelling? I tried something else:
We can see that the bulk of the audience engages more with specialized, leisure publications, and that the outliers in terms of visits and pegeviews are not ”page turners”, so to speak.
What conclusions do you draw from these representations (besides that i’m not that good at it)?
Feb/100
PorData: Portugal’s Database | A Base de dados de Portugal
Have Data Will Mashup
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Pordata.pt is a new website supported by the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation and “aims to make statistical data available in three main phases: for Portugal (1st phase), for Portugal and the countries of the EU 27 (2nd phase) and the Portuguese regions and municipalities (3rd phase). The vector common to all the information presented is time. Published in chronological series, the information is related to a long period, which begins, wherever possible, in 1960 and continues to the present day.” All these statistics available gave me the mashup frenzy. My questions is: now that they’re available, will someone do anything good with them? |
Pordata é o novo site apoiado pela Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos e “prevê disponibilizar os dados estatísticos em três fases principais: para Portugal (1.ª fase), para Portugal e países da UE 27 (2.ª fase) e para as regiões e municípios portugueses (3.ª fase). O vector comum a toda a informação apresentada é o tempo. Publicada sob a forma de séries cronológicas, a informação incide sobre um longo período, que se inicia, sempre que possível, em 1960 e se prolonga até à actualidade.” Todas estas estatísticas deram-me desejos de fazer coisas com elas. A minha pergunta é: agora que estão disponíveis, irá alguém fazer alguma coisa de jeito?
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Jan/100
news:rewired – the afternoon sessions
This is the third post about the news:rewired conference. You can read the first and the second posts too.
In the afternoon i was signed in for the Data Mashing session. I kinda expected it to be a bit technical, and i wasn’t wrong. You can’t learn how to create data visualizations and mashups in one hour, but you can get the logic and purpose of some applications to decide in the future if you’re going for this or that type of graph, or just to know that you can do this or that type of correlation between data sets. Data mashing is still a playground for those with a coder’s state of mind, and a nightmare for most of us mere wordsmiths.
So when Tony Hirst started his presentation the room was a bit caught off guard with the complexity of his work. Hirst started to explain that data tells stories, by using data visualizations reporters can look for anomalies, and find if that odd data means a story waiting to be told. He showed us some of the tools he uses in his projects with the Guardian’s Open Platform, like ManyEyes and YahooPipes, and how he geocodes that data with GeoCommons. It wasn’t a lecture for the faint of heart when it comes to coding and data geekery, but i can tell you i found it quite useful. Data mashing is one of the most important ways of getting those boring stories with loads of incomprehensible stats and figures into compelling, eye-catching visualizations. And they can also be a great tool in the research phase, when reporters are trying to look for the exception in the rule.
The next speaker showed us just that with his work with MySociety.org. Francis Irving uses data to make the powerful accountable and in the users reach. He proved that presenting the TheyWorkForYou website and the new WhatDoTheyKnow. Both these enterprises use open data to hold local and national goverment representatives responsible for their actions during their mandates. It was the “why” to the “how” that Tony Hirst showed us before.
David Dunkley Gyimah talks about video
Another speaker that i was looking forward to hear was David Dunkley Gyimah. I‘ve been following his blog since i started my own almost three years ago. He got me looking into multimedia, video journalism and online video narrative in a different way. The fact he is a fan of experimentation and he supports the creation of a unique voice for each professional instead following the exhausted television news model makes his views more interesting to follow. It is always more appealing to me hear about video using terms like cinema verité and documentary, and his style is more related to a more cinematic narrative that i feel more interesting to be used online than the 90 second pieces for night news.
He compared online video to blogs, saying it was a disruptive way to present the news, and that the online video journalist could work between the cracks of broadcast journalism. Either way, with all the visual culture that most internet users have, online video is a good place to experiment, and since it needs to be done fast and effectively, we can use the error in our favor. The weapons of choice are becoming more numerous than before, and go from a pro hd camera to a cell phone. It’s always the story and the skills of the videographer that make the final result good or bad. You can see a hectic David doing his presentation in the video below.
