New MIT Media Lab Tool Lets Anyone Visualize Unwieldy Government Data

Fastcompany reporting: In the four years since the U.S. government created data.gov, the first national repository for open data, more than 400,000 datasets have become available online from 175 agencies like the USDA, the Department of Energy, and the EPA. Governments all over the world have taken steps to make their data more transparent and available to the public. But in practice, much of that data--accessible as spreadsheets through sites like data.gov--is incomprehensible to the average person, who might not know how to wrangle huge data sets. Never-ending tables mean next to nothing to me, even if I know that they might be hiding some interesting relationship within their numbers, like how income stacks up with happiness.
To wade through what César Hidalgo, director of the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab, calls "the last 10 inches" separating people from their government's incoherent tables and spreadsheets, Hidalgo turned to visualization. DataViva, a website Hidalgo and a few collaborators helped develop with the Brazilian state government of Minas Gerais, offers a wide array of web apps that turn those spreadsheets into something more comprehensible for the average user, whether that's a policy maker, someone working for the World Bank, an entrepreneur, or a student. The site, which officially launched last week, can be a bit overwhelming to navigate, but it has lofty goals: to visualize data encompassing the entire Brazilian economy over the last decade, with more than 100 million interactive visualizations that can be created at the touch of a button in a series of apps. The future of open government isn't just dumping raw datasets onto a server: It's also about making those datasets digestible for a less data-savvy public.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3022701/innovation-by-design/new-mit-media-lab-tool-lets-anyone-visualize-unwieldy-government-data?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=f4f0149392-Need_to_Know_December_6_201312_6_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-f4f0149392-31701933

When UX Takes a Back Seat to Pageviews

Digitoday reporting:

The pressures of the current publishing world are making publishers compromise the standard user experience. A talented designer or user-experience expert would be aghast as some practices employed by marquee brands.

We see it in the form of video autoplays, welcome ads, in-article links or the ubiquitous slideshow. A user experience expert sees such tactics as antithetical to providing people with an enjoyable visit. And yet they’ve become common practice as publishers have grown beholden to the pageview economy, where low ad prices mean the pressure is on to generate more an more clicks. The pressure to squeeze as much revenue out of a single page’s real estate has simply made it too easy to toss some of the most basic user-experience tenets by the wayside.

“When you’re getting pressure from all around and see white space, the urge is to fill with more options but is antithetical to what the user wants,” said Dan Maccarone, co-founder of Charming Robot, a design agency whose current clients include ABC News, Mental Floss and Backstage.

A few of the more offensive tactics:

Video autoplay Nobody likes a video that launches automatically. And yet, from the Washington Post to ABC News, they’re everywhere. “Video is sexy for advertisers, but not for users,”
Slideshows Every single article on the Huffington Post has one.  ...“If they can convert that one person to going a slideshow of 20 photos, they can count that traffic as 21 pageviews,”...
Links between paragraphs...
http://digiday.com/publishers/publishers-cut-design-corners/ 

Tablet editions: Leveraging tap, swipe and scroll

emedia/vitals reporting:
Publishers continue to experiment with ways to turn touch-screen functionality into a better user experience for their tablet editions. By my account, they're making good progress.
I spent the last couple of weeks immersed in 10 consumer magazines running on a Kindle Fire tablet: eight Condé Nast titles (Condé Nast Traveler, Glamour, Golf Digest, GQ, Self, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired), Time Inc.'s Sports Illustrated, and Reader's Digest. The Condé titles and Reader's Digest were developed with Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite. (Disclosure: Adobe provided the Kindle as a loaner to review these publications.) The Sports Illustrated app was created by Time Inc. and the Wonderfactory.
Adobe has been aggressively positioning its Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) as a seamless and sophisticated platform for print publishers looking to produce high-quality digital editions. Earlier this month, the company announced that more than 16 million DPS-based digital publications had been downloaded over the past year.
As a whole, the magazines I reviewed speak well to the progress publishers have made in the tablet space in a relatively short amount of time. Here's an overview of the functionality that's defining a new generation of digital publications. 
Navigation
Condé has taken a more-is-more approach to navigation with its digital publications. Any given page offers a choice of vertical swiping/ scrolling (to page through an article) and lateral swiping (to advance to the next editorial asset or ad). That's in addition to the multiple navigation options accessible by tapping on the page, including a back button, a horizontal "scrubber" bar on the bottom of each page, a top horizontal "browser" index on the top of each page, and a drop-down TOC. Phew!...
http://www.emediavitals.com/content/tablet-editions-leveraging-tap-swipe-and-scroll?utm_source=Vital+Guide+to+eMedia&utm_campaign=2173104c7d-EMV_VG_Tablet_App_Strategies5_10_2012&utm_medium=email

The Media Map: Who's Reading What And Where

Forbes reporting:  We worked with Bitly and its data on millions of Web clicks to find the most influential media outlets in the country. This map shows which news sources are read and shared at above-average levels by state. Roll over and click on the media outlets below to see where they influence readers and which stories were big hits. Updated monthly to reflect the latest trends.
http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2012/media-map.html

Interactive migration graphics

Forbes reporting: Interative migrations statistic 19.11.2011

http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2011/migration.html

4 reasons the Sunday front page now looks a lot like the Monday front page

Poynter reporting:
Where are all of the truly great Sunday, front page designs in the U.S. these days?
As I do my daily run through the Newseum’s collection of front pages, Sunday looks a lot like Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday.
“Papers seem to be taking fewer chances,” said Suzette Moyer, creative director of the St. Petersburg Times’ Bay Magazine. “Instead of blowing out that one big story that they know is good, papers are trying to appease every reader by cramming it all on the front page.”
You have a little more time to read on a Sunday, right? And more time to analyze what you’ve read. It should be special.
Granted, there might be a beautifully executed front page on any given Sunday in any given town with the ability to stop a reader in her tracks. Some papers excel at this (see examples below). But, by and large, I think the volume has been turned down to a rather monotonous murmur around the U.S.
“I don’t think there is enough surprise to most Sunday papers,” said Moyer.
And no big surprise as to why.
Supposition 1: There are tough cuts in every part of the newsroom. It’s unfortunate and inevitable. But perhaps we’ve reached a tipping point in quality by eliminating too many positions for visual journalists?
Design and graphics staffs are about half the size they were 10 years ago, says Jeff Goertzen, graphics director of the Denver Post (and soon to be director of graphics at USA Today), who conducted an informal survey of about 50 newsrooms earlier this year.
“The average design staff that was about 22-24 people 10 years ago in a big newsroom is now around 12 or 13 people,” said Goertzen. Where there were once nine artists, those staffs now have three or four. Eight of the major papers surveyed have no graphic artists at all. Copy desks and photo staffs have taken tremendous hits, too.
http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgathering-storytelling/visual-voice/149076/4-reasons-the-sunday-front-page-now-looks-a-lot-like-the-monday-front-page/

Hold the front page - it's time US papers had a redesign

Guardian reprting:
 You don't need to love Rupert Murdoch to admire what he's done with the WSJ. Sir Harold Evans, the white knight of the Sunday Times, has joined that fan club. The Journal (circulation revenue growing 17 straight quarters in a row, digital subscriptions up as well, by nearly 22% in a year to over half a million) has boosted its weekend edition with two new sections, added a controversial Greater New York news section, and produced the WSJ magazine more often. In short, it hasn't stood still.
The layout is crisp and notably shorter on "turns" of stories from page to page. On royal wedding morning plus one, it ran a well-focused picture across three-quarters of the front. It projects and bounces with confidence. It feels like a paper on the move.
Now examine those other front pages outside the Newseum. They're pleased that public enemy number one is dead, of course. Cue exultant headlines. But stand back on the pavement, take in the panorama, and something else registers. They all – from Lexington to Des Moines to Pueblo – look much the same. They're ex-broadsheets in format with columns squeezed to save newsprint (from crunch to crunch). They're mean, constricted, somehow shrivelling away. It's as though they'd read Ken Doctor's latest obituary and taken a turn for the worse.
...Daily Mail executives, fresh from their 65-million-a-month unique browser figures in the latest ABCe audits, say quietly that one reason for their startling online rise in the US is simply that they do journalism sharper and better. Well, you don't need to get too mired in a controversy like that. But the US showbusiness site at Mail Online certainly knocks aggregated spots off its American competitors, at least for the moment. And the stories themselves are written hard and fast for maximum screen consumption.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/may/08/hold-the-front-page-us-papers-redesign?CMP=twt_fd

Business Class: Freemium for News?

informationarchitects reporting:
...Reading news online feels like flying Economy. Loud distracting banners, cheap stock picture material, sloppy typography, a lot of useless comment noise, machine generated reading tips, no human service, and a claustrophobic information design make the reading experience a torture. If you’ve been designing online newspapers as well, of course, you know that designers cannot solve this problem by themselves. Newspapers need to make money. And most newspapers look the way they look because the design briefings are the way they are. The following comparison demonstrates how much space and attention that marketing strategy needs to pay for the product, and how small the space is for actual content:

 The idea of creating a business class for online news where is not about buying information, but buying better experience, it’s about service and customer experience. That’s right: Customer (paying), not user (free).
http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/business-class-news

Explainer maps locate, contextualize and localize, increase site traffic

Poynter reporting by Mallary Jean Tenore Published Mar. 29, 2011 6:40 am Updated Mar. 29, 2011 5:30 pm

In recent weeks, the media have reported on how events in Libya and Japan are affecting Misurata, Az Zintan, Tripoli and Rikuzentakata.
Is your geography good enough to know that Misurata and Az Zintan are in northwest Libya, that Tripoli is northeast of Kabaw, and that Rikuzentakata is a coastal town in northeast Japan?
If not, then look at some of the maps that journalists at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and CNN have published recently in print and online.

A chart showing the spike in searches for maps of Libya.

Stats from Google trends indicate that people want to know where the countries and cities in the news are located. Searches for maps of Libya and Japan, for instance, have spiked significantly this month.
Google’s Sean Carlson says he’s seen a steady flow of news organizations using Google Maps and Google Earth to help illustrate recent international stories. He looks at these tools as “helicopters in the hands of news organizations” — ways to provide readers with a perspective they might not otherwise get from text or photos.
http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgathering-storytelling/125206/explainer-maps-locate-contextualize-and-localize-news-from-libya-japan

How to make a heatmap in google fusion tables

Poynter reporting
Online journalists are well aware of how important data can be to stories. But how do we give visual context to raw information without an army of developers at our disposal?
If the data has been normalized and saved as an Excel file, .ods, .csv or .kml, Google Fusion Tables can help. Fusion Tables manages large collections of data so you can query, map, timegraph, chart, and add interaction — including user comments — to them.
News outlets have used Fusion Tables most often for mapping data. Take a look:

• The poorest and richest places in England (heat map from The Guardian)
• Worldwide map of nuclear power stations and earthquake zones (heat map from maptd)

http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/digital-strategies/126628/how-to-make-a-heatmap-in-google-fusion-tables