June 5
For Data Viz or Political Junkies
Regardless of your political associations, you will have to agree that this is an extremely simple, elegant and well designed solution for viewing election results from the NY Times. No surprises here I guess, since I think most have come to expect this type of execution from their great team of interactive designers.
In an election season with so many ups and downs as well as the amazingly thinly sliced and diced demographic results, its great to see it all in one place in a rich yet easily understood format.
I heard recently of the notion that Data Visualization as a medium for human communication is replacing or becoming more important than Narrative. Some believe that the form of Narrative is more appropriate for communicating ideas in a society with relatively small amounts of stored data or knowledge. With the modern advent of the digital database, and exponentially increasing amounts of storage capability as well as information that needs to be stored, a new way of communicating is evolving or is said to be needed.
It’s an intoxicating idea isn’t it? A new way of communication based on database information and an evolving visual language that is being formed by a global and collective army of designers and coders.
However, I think this misses some important points and can be easily understood by the example shown above.
Where in this visualization do we see the references to the historic and groundbreaking stories that define these candidates? Where are the human stories that created their character (or lack thereof depending on your perspective) or even these characters framed within our ongoing national conversation, or if you like, narrative?
The For Data Viz or Political Junkies by Molecular Voices, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
dgoetz said on June 6th, 2008
I feel that with the continually decreasing attention span of the human race, visualization will eventually replace narration as the most commonly used way to communicate information to the world.
Ryan Mulloy said on June 9th, 2008
Dave Land said on June 10th, 2008
In addition, I don’t think that pure data visualization completely tells the story. As you click through the categories in the Times visualization, the data slews slightly towards Clinton or Obama for all demographic groups but one: for Blacks, all fifty states fairly fling themselves against the Obama side of the chart.
There is a long, deep, moving story to be told about a long-marginalized people lining up behind one of their own behind that graphical shift. There could be a long, deep, but ultimately frustrating story to be told about opportunities lost to bring the country together after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, in the 1930s, when nearly the entire country was plunged into the kind of poverty that had principally been the lot of blacks or in the 1960s, as blacks sought and received cautious measures of fairness.
Those stories may well be supported by dynamic data visualizations, but would most likely rely more on the strength of the narrative stories behind them.
As radio did not replace books, or films radio, or television either radio or films, data visualization will not replace narrative, but will merely broaden the array of tools that skilled rhetoricians will use to “tell their stories”.