Debategraph is a software tool with applications for addressing, defining and attacking many types of problems in many ways. Here’s one of their interactive maps on epidemiology:
Who’s using it? Apparently the White House, CNN, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Office in the United Kingdom. A concept map explaining DebateGraph itself appears below.
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See also German authorities find new al-Qaeda documents hidden in porn files on flash drive: CNN (a related post here on Popular Logistics). The slideshow which follows is a preliminary attempt to compile a more useful visual data set of the events in London on 7 July 2005. We’ve got a few things in mind, after the jump:
Henry Woodbury explains, in Data in the Round, what’s problematic with the following illustration of United States energy imports:
Data in the Round on the InformationDesign Watch, a blog by the team at Dynamic Diagrams,
Frederick County, Maryland, uses a very simple red/green system on its website. The only navigation buttons with a colored circle relate to emergency preparedness. In normal times – the button is green:
But, for emergency – including dangerous weather – notifications – the same button will be red and flashing. From the Frederick County website:
When this bar is on the homepage with a flashing red light, an emergency
condition exists. Clicking on this bar will lead to the Emergency/Weather Notices webpage, with information from emergency officials.
I assume that they’ve got a macro – or some other one-step process to substitute the red navigation button for the green.
It’s a nice touch – the feature – and the website – were designed by CivicPlus, a Kansas-based outfit that designs websites for governments and schools. Here’s a link to their portfolio.
Nathan Yau, a doctoral candidate at UCLA in statistics, is the proprietor of Flowing Data, an excellent blog about data visualization. My guess is that it would be fair to say that there’s a greater emphasis on quantitative data viz, rather than instructional or other non-quantitative work. In any case – it’s excellent.
Came across Yau’s April post – “Data Visualization Blogs You Might Not Know About” which, in and of itself, is an excellent list. Add to that the contributions of the commenters, including the always excellent Jorge Camoes.Camoes added anoyhrt 15 listings; Tom Carden added over a dozen more; and a handful of people added one or two links. (As it happens, I’m trying to work out what for me is a visual representation of a complex argument – so I’m searching for a spot-on or really close analogy – hence my particular delight in finding such a collection). Take the post and comment together – and it’s much more than a starting point.
Here’s a link to Jorge Camoes’ charts blog; to Tom Carden’s blog (Random, etc.) – but if the subject is of interest, be sure to check out Nathan Yau’s work at Flowing Data.(this started as a somewhat longer post – but due to the vagaries of this particular WP 2.7 install – well, brevity is the soul of wit).
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Just came across a remarkable interview of Mies Hora (“Navigating Today’s
Signs – An Interview with Mies Hora”)(TinyUrl here ) by Stev Heller in the AIGA blog. Mies Hora is the founder of UltimateSymbol, which publishes books and usable electronic images of signs (as well as fonts and some other goodies). In a sense, these books make him the heir to Henry Dreyfuss
and Otto Neurath.
Pictures of Numbers is one of the websites run by Mike Dickison, an accomplished polymath who’s done some excellent work in information design with scientific and other information. A typical post compares two ways of looking at religious attitudes in a set of countries; his point (if I understand correctly) is that one often has options of putting much richer data into a single information graphic. His solution – entirely workable – would never have occurred to me.
[Readers will notice an uptick in information graphics posts as we are trying to prepare a number of visual aids – initially a set which tries to explain our purpose here atPopular Logistics: to examine the intersection between the sets of policy problems generally named “disaster preparedness,” “public health,” “environmental policy,” “energy policy,” “transportation policy,” “urban planning,” and “terrorism.” They’ve all got common threads – and to a surprising extent, common solutions – and that’s what we’re here to explain. But we’d like to present a richer version of these arguments – with few words and many more graphics. Hence our return to the precincts of Edward Tufte – and his books, and other information designers. So – we apologize to any readers who regard these posts as “off-topic,” but promise that, in time, we’ll make clear these connections].
The post which nearly knocked me out of my chair was Graphical Octants – how to, readably, add a third axis to a standard X/Y axis – I’ve been wrestling with how to show three variables – for instance – for disaster preparedness interventions, wanting to demonstrate:
Dickison has an elegant graphic solution to this problem in Graphical Octants . We hope to update this post with illustrations after speaking with Mr. Dickison.
I’ve been creating a series of diagrams – about systems, risks, disaster planning scenarios – and also thinking about other ways to model risks, mitigation and response strategies – the ideal solutions of course would all involve open source software. Since the government is already paying primarily no attention to building community based preparedness programs, good data solutions are critical – but so is the lowest possible prices (which is to say: Open Sourceand free. While I haven’t found or developed what I think will be sufficient, the information design community (that may not be the right name) has in it a very large propertion of very smart people. (The best, and I own every one of his books, is Edward Tufte
. Also his dog photos are the best.
So I thought that, as I cast about for the proper data metaphors – I’d note some of the coolest – some of which are just beautiful, clever – and may or may not provide solutions for the planners in our audience. So – for the moment – the New York State power grid
How Terrorism Works – an information graphic by Andrei Michael Herasimchuk. We’ve requested permission to reproduce it – but, for the time being, you can see it on his blog, Design By Fire
