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Design

An Insider’s Guide to Infographics

Visualizing the future of data interpretation.

Journalism in the Age of Data from geoff mcghee on Vimeo.

We’ve all seen infographics of how many tweets are going on in your city or the web’s most visited sites, even movie character interactions. In case you’ve been living in a cave, it’s known as data visualisation, which is communicating data in graphical form that’s as aesthetically pleasing (and sometimes confusing) as it is informative. It’s a trend that’s been growing both in support and usage over the last few years. You won’t come across an article in The New York Times or BBC News online without some form of infographic breaking down election results or how you spent your day; be it eating, reading, sleeping, or viewing infographics.

The task facing these data visualisers moving into the future is how to add a narrative to the flowering, cascading, morphing, streaming visuals that flow before us like a pimped-up bar graph. In the documentary above, Journalism in the Age of Data, leaders in the field like BBC News online, Condé Nast, the New York Times, MSNBC, and IBM Research look at where this relatively new but growing field of information harvesting will go next. What will it coalesce into? How will it inform us without bewildering us? Do we need to data visualize the data visuals? And it looks at whether we’re entering a brave new media world of online reporting where a fusion of story, visuals, and sound will emerge and create an entirely new type of new media. An example of a step in this direction is Jonathan Jarvis’s Crisis of Credit Visualized which turns the complex story of the economic crisis into a simple visual narrative using a graphic form combined with animation techniques and voiceover.

Right now, data visualisation is the new rock and roll, it’s used more and more by online news agencies, partly because they can, and partly because it’s becoming easier to do using websites that create the visuals for you by feeding in the data. Is this the beginning of a new expressive language, as Fernanda Viégas from IBM Research suggests in the film? Or is it all just data gazing in a virtual cul-de-sac? Will we be seeing breaking news stories visualized in data sets as they happen? We’ll just have to wait and see.

[via Infosthetics]