Research: How to Tell Stories with Data? (Editor's note: this is a guest post by Enrico Bertini from Fell in Love with Data) The following post describes not only one of my favorite papers from VisWeek this year, but I have the feeling it will be one of those papers which has the potential to lead to a big impact in the way we will use, and see, information visualization in the future. Edward Segel and Jeffrey Heer decided to analyze the right thing at the right moment: How Do People Tell Stories through Interactive Visualization? (PDF, stanford.edu) The whole trend behind storytelling with vis is, at least in my opinion, one of the biggest changes we are experiencing in visualization since many years.
Method: What the authors did Edward and Jeff analyzed a large set of interactive visualizations for storytelling and, through an iterative process, identified common patterns and built a classification on top of it. In this post, I rather will focus on the parts of the models I deem useful and personally appreciated the most. Journalists Need to Do the Math. What is a Data Journalist? Canada leading the way in data journalism? According to the Guardian, Canada is becoming a world leader when it comes to innovative data journalism. Open data sites are popping up across Canada, providing "vast open data resources" and "the latest open data apps" for Canadians interested in all things from transit schedules and one-way street maps to election results by neighborhood. Datasets and spreadsheets are gathered by journalists around the country, but most notably by Patrick Cain, a Toronto basted data journalist who pursues vast amounts of statistics, files and data and then plugs the compiled information into interactive maps which can be viewed by the public.
Journalists, city and government officials are working together to further develop the project. The Canadian government is in the midst of establishing an open data policy and recently the four biggest data sites, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Ottawa, have started collaborating to set a series of open data standards, the Guardian reports. Source: Guardian.