Reading the Landscape: Infographics, Interactive Scholarly Works And the Future of Media
Keynote presentation to the Deutsche Infografikpreis (German Infographics Awards), Berlin, February 21, 2014. NOTE: Download the PDF to get clickable links in slides!
of Media Geoff McGhee Deutscher Infografikpreis Keynote Berlin, 21 February 2014 Twitter: @mcgeoff Sunday, March 2, 14 Today I’ll be talking about my work chronicling developments in the field of data visualization, and connecting it to the growing importance of infographics and data vis in research and scholarship. Then I’ll be discussing work using visualization to explore and explain the North American West, at the Stanford research center where I’ve been for the past four years.
me here. It’s an honor to be a part of the first annual German infographics awards. One of the interesting things about the prize is that it represents not just the news media but also academic research (as well as business). As someone whose work spans those worlds, I’d like to speak about how infographics and data visualization are a deeply interdisciplinary medium.
talk in English, I wanted to say a few words about the history of the German language in the United States. This is a page from the Philadephische Zeitung, published by Benjamin Frankin in the 1730s.
Congress Chronicling America directory) Sunday, March 2, 14 As this series of maps shows, German-language newspapers were very common in the United States well through the 19th century, up until World War I. The Espionage Act of 1917 was hard on non-English publications, which were subject to evaluation of their “loyalty” by postmasters. A strange artifact of this data set is the reappearance in 1945 of numerous German language papers – in Prisoner of War camps around the US. It was not uncommon for camps to publish their own newspapers, something we see also in the Japanese internment camps from the same period. (This map came out of research we did at my Center into the history of US Newspapers)
grandmother Clara Schillinger Hoffmann, at left. I’m at the right Sunday, March 2, 14 You don’t have to dig far to find my family connections to Germany. My mother grew up in Konstanz, in Southern Germany. Here I am in the late 70’s with my grandparents on a visit to Germany.
My first job in journalism was at ABC News, where I worked in the information graphics unit for ABCNews.com. During my time there I prototyped and produced a series of interactive graphics for 8-12 year old kids, which ran on ABC and Disney.com.
By the mid-2000s we were producing large quantities of multimedia projects, using templates I created in Adobe Flash and using a rudimentary content management system I hacked together (left). My goal was to create a seamless merger of infographics, video, photos, sound and interactivity, centered around a great story. The example at right is from a Flash mini-site I built in 2006 for a television documentary coproduction with ZDF, Canadian Broadcasting, France Televisions and Welsh TV. The CMS made it possible to edit and republish the site and its infographics in multiple languages.
upended by this work by Aaron Koblin, who was an art student in California when he made this data visualization, “Flight Patterns,” showing 24 hours of FAA flight tracking data from a single day in 2005 or 2006. It revealed to me that the future of infographics would feature algorithmically generated images drawn from data sets, maybe large ones, and I’d need to bone up on the skills necessary to make them.
systems • Database management • Web application development Back to School Sunday, March 2, 14 To pursue these types of skills, I took a break from the newsroom and did a journalism fellowship at Stanford University, which gave me a year to study some of the core skills of data visualization.
14 During the fellowship year, I took the time to interview a number of leaders in the field of information visualization in journalism, research and art, which I compiled in the documentary Journalism in the Age of Data, which came out in 2010.
and presentation • New players and skillsets are joining newsrooms • We need to learn more about telling stories with data • Good tools for narrative visualization don’t exist yet Journalism in the Age of Data (2010) Sunday, March 2, 14 Here are some of the key points from the film.
it’s going on four years since the film came out, I thought I’d run through some of the key developments that have taken place since them. I’ll post these slides so you can get the links to explore these in more detail.
a turning point. We’d seen our primary tool of choice, Adobe Flash, lose its ubiquitousness as Apple banned it from mobile devices like the iPhone, and later the iPad. Meanwhile, HTML5 and various javascript libraries and toolkits were finally catching up with Flash’s capabilities in creating interactive animations and data visualizations. None of these was more important than the javascript toolkit D3, which was developed by Mike Bostock, Jeff Heer and others from whom I took a course in data vis during my fellowship at Stanford. This remarkable infographic showing all of the possible outcomes of the 2012 presidential election is a very pertinent example. First, it showcases the wonderful fluidity of the D3 visualization toolkit, and second it shows the impact of D3 creator Mike Bostock’s joining The New York Times to work with the amazing Shan Carter, a collision of data vis worlds that has spawned very influential work.
made a big impact in 2012, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas’ Wind Map. This screen capture was made during particularly vivid wind conditions, as Hurricane Sandy roared up the east coast.
sales by Michael Chang and the Google Creative Lab served both to highlight important research by a Swedish NGO and to showcase the remarkable graphics capabilities of modern browsers like Google Chrome.
to Succeed Flash: D3js, HTML5... Sunday, March 2, 14 In short, I think the most important single development in recent years has been the growth and advancing maturity of browser- native interactive data visualizations. That said, there still aren’t any authoring tools with the kind of editing canvas we had in Flash, although there is promise shown by some interesting but limited animation and layout tools like Adobe Edge, Tumult Hype and Google’s Web Designer.
research originated at Stanford) has been around for several years. Tableau’s free edition Public came out more recently, bringing drag-and-drop data visualization and prototyping to a broader audience, particularly media organizations. Also, the interactive web exports of Tableau’s dashboards have become increasingly sophisticated and performant. I think that the pending release of Tableau for Mac is going to have a great impact on the infographics community.
and Data Vis Tools Clockwise from top left: MapBox TileMill, Infogr.am, Density Design RAW, Tableau Desktop, ABZV Datawrapper, Stanford/Density D Palladio, CartoDB Sunday, March 2, 14 Along with Tableau, a number of tools have emerged in recent years that make it much easier to develop, or at least prototype, some pretty slick data visualizations. CartoDB and TileMill have taken web mapping to the next level, adding in very significant image control options, while Density Design’s RAW and the upcoming Stanford digital humanities tool Palladio are making it much easier for a broad spectrum of users to rapidly visualize information. And Infogram and Datawrapper have made basic interactive charts much easier and more accessible.
Infographics on all Devices (?) Sunday, March 2, 14 One challenge in making interactive graphics in recent years has been the fragmentation of screen sizes brought by mobile devices and tablets. The emergence of responsive design has made it possible to design websites that adapt to different screen sizes, automatically redrawing their layouts to optimize the user experience. But it is a significant challenge – a puzzle, really – to create responsive interactive graphics that adapt to different canvas sizes, since infographics rely both on space and on fine detail. Here are some interesting examples of infographics that have attempted to bridge that divide.
the last year or two has been the emergence of scrolling as a navigational and storytelling tool. Whereas in the past, infographics creators struggled to pack as much information as possible at the top of the screen (“above the fold”), so as not to be missed by users, touch screens and swipe-to-scroll mice and trackpads have made scrolling down the page nearly effortless. Through the off-label usage of so called parallax scrolling, which lets you make different elements move at different speeds (as if they are at different eye distances), interface designers have found ways to create a multimedia experience with little or no direct interaction other than scrolling.
is all. Sunday, March 2, 14 Here’s some examples of projects that lead users through detailed infographics and multimedia just by scrolling down the page. From left, MTV/Good Magazine, which uses a particularly unconventional method of displaying through time series charts as you move through them. Other landmark works of scroll-based storytelling are The New York Times’s Snow Fall, and ESPN’s long-form report on the quirky disco-era baseball player Dock Ellis.
a lot of time trying to craft interfaces that would lead users to CLICK on important storytelling navigation. A “next” button, a chapter title, a detail label that would lead to more interaction. I remember how surprising it was when user research showed that some users just DIDN’T SEE those interface elements and thus didn’t click on them. What’s intriguing about scrolling – particularly when it is results in more than just moving down the page, but highlighting individual elements within the page – is that it recreates the sense of a user path that has existed implicitly in print infographics for a long time. At left, a classic example of John Grimwade’s “red line” maps, here leading visitors on a tour through the old city of Jerusalem. At best, the use of scrolling can help guide a user through a graphic or series of graphics. At worst, it will lock users into a predefined path and deny them free exploration, which I would describe as analogous to the roller coaster at right.
Infographics Community Sunday, March 2, 14 In Journalism in the Age of Data, I explored the many ways that researchers, journalists and artists were collaborating across disciplines, aided by online communities and offline events like the Hacks/Hackers meetups around the world. In recent years, we’ve seen this community grow and flourish, typified by the growing conference circuit – with events like Visualized, Eyeo and Tapestry joining established meetings like VisWeek and Malofiej. We’ve also seen interesting conversations take place in venues like Interactive Things’ “Substratum” interview series and Enrico Bertini and Moritz Stefaner’s great podcast, “Data Stories.”
Manuals, and Treatises Sunday, March 2, 14 As someone who went back to school to try to relearn data analysis and visualization, I find it very encouraging that a whole library of books has emerged to help beginners and mid-career professionals learn data vis and infographics skills. Foremost among those is Alberto Cairo’s The Functional Art,” but I’m also a big fan of Isabel Meirelles’ just released “Design for Information” and work by Andy Kirk, Nathan Yau and Hunter Whitney. Also, the “Data Journalism Handbook” was an inspiring crowdsourced collaboration that I was proud to contribute to.
$372 000 000 $407 000 000 $5 040 000 000 $590 000 000 $850 000 000 $327 000 000 $3 100 000 000 $187 000 000 $35 000 000 $2 500 000 CLOSED CLOSED $2 000 000 $10 000 000 2000 2005 2010 2010 2005 2000 MySpace, das einst größte soziale Netzwerk im Internet, wechselte im Mai 2011 für nur $35 Mio. den Besitzer. Wir zeigen die sieben schlechtesten Deals in der Geschichte des Internets. Rupert Murdochs News Corp. kaufte MySpace im Sommer 2005 für $327 Mio. Zum Jahr 2006 lag MySpace an der Spitze der Unique Page Views weltweit und dominierte den Markt im Bereich sozialer Netzwerke. In nur zwei Jahren überholte Facebook das soziale Netzwerk MySpace was die Popularität angeht. Seitdem hat MySpace durchschnittlich bis zu 1 Million Unique Visitors pro Monat verloren. 2010 lag MySpace mit 100 Millionen registrierter Nutzer weit hinter Facebook mit 640 Millionen registrierten Nutzern. Im Oktober 2010 hat MySpace offiziell seine Nie- derlage eingestanden und verwandtelte sich in ein Entertainment-Portal. Der Wandel ist aber nicht wirklich gelungen und MySpaces Popularität rutschte immer weiter ab. Ende 2010 verzeichnete MySpace einen Verlust in Höhe von $165 Mio bei einem Gewinn von $109 Mio. Es war nicht leicht mit solchen Zahlen einen Käufer zu finden, am Ende kaufte die Firma Specific Media das soziale Netzwerkportal. News Corp. behält 5% der MySpace-Anteile. Die israelische Firma Mirabilis entwickelte die Kommunikations- software ICQ im Jahr 1996. Zwei Jahre später zahlte AOL für den Chat-Dienst etwas mehr als $400 Mio ($120 Mio. als Bonus für die Entwickler). Zu der Zeit war das der größte Deal für den israeli- schen Technologie-Sektor. Große Erfolge konnte ICQ seitdem nicht mehr feiern und musste seine Marksposition an die Konkurrenz (MSN, Skype und Google Talks) abgeben. Im Jahr 2010 nutzten etwa 33 Millionen Menschen weltweit ICQ, fast ein Drittel da- von in Russland. Dies erklärt das Interesse des russischen Fonds DST (heute Mail.ru Group), das im Jahr 2010 $187 Mio. für den Dienst bezahlt. Der französisches Medien- konzern Vivendi International übernimmt im Jahr 2001 den Musikdienst MP3.com für $372 Mio. MP3.com Gründer Michael Robertson und Greg Flores versuchten die Welt zu verändern, indem sie Musikern die Möglichkeit gaben, ihre Musik ohne Plattenfirmen zu verkaufen. Vivendi, das unter anderem einen der größten Majors (Uni- versal Music) besitzt, verfolgt ganz andere Ziele und möchte sich mit dem Service als weltweitführender Vertragshändler der digitalen Musik positionieren. Im Jahr 2003 verkaufte Vivendi den Service dem Medienun- ternehmen CNET Networks, das diesen sofort schließt und nur die URL. Auf dem Höhepunkt der „Dotcom-Blase“ im Jahr 1999 bezahlt Yahoo! $5,04 Mrd. für Broadcast.com — ein primitiver Prototyp von YouTube. Nach dem Kauf versucht Yahoo! mehrere Jahre den Dienst in seine Struk- tur zu integrieren. Broadcast.com ist es nicht gelungen ein Hit zu werden. Als die Blase platzt, verliert Broadcast.com zusammen mit vielen anderen Diensten an Wert. Heute existiert Broadcast.com nicht mehr. Der Verkauf von Broadcast.com machte deren Gründer Mark Kyubana und Todd Wagner zu Milliardären. Mark Kyubanu ist heute der Besitzer des Clubs NBA Dallas Mavericks und steht auf Platz 546 der Forbesliste der reichsten Menschen der Welt. Skype erschien im Jahr 2003 und wurde zwei Jahre später von eBay für insgesamt $3,1 Mrd. aufgekauft. Ein Jahr später verkauft eBay das Kontrollpaket von Skype an eine Gruppe von privaten Investoren für $2 Mrd. Zum Glück behielt eBay rund 30% von Skype und konnte gutes Geld bei dem Verkauf an Microsoft für $8,5 Mrd. verdienen. Im Jahr 2008 im Zuge der Popularität von sozialen Netzwerken, als sich die Nutzerzahl von Facebook um 150% monatlich erhöht und bis zum Ende des Sommers die Marke von 100 Millionen registrierten Usern erreicht, entschied AOL ein eigenes Netz zu erwerben und kauft Bebo von Michael und Hochi Birch. AOL ist nicht in der Lage Zuckerbergs Facebook ernsthaft Konkur- renz zu machen und beginnt ein Jahr später einen Käufer für Bebo zu suchen. Im Sommer 2010 kaufte der private Fond Criterion Capital Partners den Service 85 Mal billiger. In zwei Jahren, unter der Aufsicht von AOL, sank die Zahl der Unique Visitors pro Monat von 22 Millionen auf 14,6 Millionen. Und die Tendenz ist weiter rückläufig. Jetzt ist Bebo ein kleines Unternehmen mit 50 Angestellten. Cisco erwarb Flip, ein herstellende Unternehmen Pure Digital im Jahr 2009 für $590 Mio. Der Grund für die Beliebtheit von Flip Videokameras war die Anbin- dung an die Dienste wie YouTube. Zur gleichen Zeit verbessern die Handyherstel- ler die Qualität der Videoaufnahmen. Als Ergebnis wurde der Bedarf an kleinen Flip-Kameras immer geringer. Zu Beginn 2011 schließt Cisco vollständig die Produktion von Kameras und entlässt alle Mitarbeiter. FLOPDEALS IM INTERNET Quelle: Forbes Rein statistisch gesehen, wird alle drei Minuten in Deutschland ein PKW gestohlen. Welche Automarken bei den Dieben besonders beliebt sind, zeigen wir auf Seite 2. 0 1 DR. BOXER2 S. 3 4 Sunday, March 2, 14
a big step forward in recent years, as typified by Nicholas Felton’s 2010 work, the Feltron Annual Report. After a number of years of chronicling minutiae of his own life in a cheekily sober and elegant corporate annual report format, Nicholas took a year off to make this data-driven tribute to his father, who passed away in 2010. Born here in Berlin as Günter Fajgenbaum, he fled the holocaust to make a new life in England, Canada and then the United States, the Anglicized name Gordon Felton. I think that this edition of the Feltron Report crossed the line into literature, showing a new maturity of the form.
Self” Goes Mainstream Sunday, March 2, 14 It was also significant that Nicholas Felton, whose work was influential in the design and quantified self movements, brought personal data logging to the mainstream when he joined Facebook and helped them develop the timeline-based profile page.
just left Facebook to pursue other things, among them the new Reporter iPhone app, which is a publicly marketed version of the life-tracking tool he developed to compile data for his annual reports. This isn’t Nicholas’ first foray into creating quantified self tools. A few years back he co-created Daytum, a website for personal data compilation.
map for the Refugee Project by Hyperaktiv Journalism in the Age of Data: Since 2010 New Players in Narrative Visualization Academics, researchers, NGOs, government Sunday, March 2, 14 Lastly, a point that I hope will resonate with the audience here tonight at the German Infographics Awards, we’re seeing narrative data visualization work being created by a much broader span of organizations, particularly NGOs, advocacy groups and research institutes. I think this is significant, because while charts, plots and data visualization have been a staple of social science and research for many years, the difference is that these works are meant to engage the general public with stories, and causes.
Publications Sunday, March 2, 14 Some work done at Stanford by my colleague Elijah Meeks is exceptional testimony to the type of innovation in storytelling, data visualization and storytelling happening in the field now.
March 2, 14 This is a visualization of visualization at Stanford that Elijah Meeks made back in 2010, around the time I was starting at my current job. I’m way off in the edge there.
Richard White Sunday, March 2, 14 It was an unexpected but delightful turn to join a research center after finishing my fellowship, after which I had originally expected to go back into the news media. Founded by the historians David M. Kennedy and Richard White, the Bill Lane Center for the American West sought to become the “go-to-place” for information on the past, present and future of the North American West. We are supported by an endowment from the Bill Lane family, who published the popular Sunset magazine for many years, a western lifestyle bible for millions of Americans. I should also give big thanks to Jon Christensen, who as executive director of the Bill Lane Center helped bring a new emphasis on data visualization, collaboration and public engagement and who made my joining the center possible.
North American West in the context of infographics. Pared down to its essence, an infographic is a visually intuitive representation of factual information. I’d like to argue that the western part of North America is in many ways a living infographic.
shows the emptiness of large parts of the West. In black are Census blocks with less than one person per square mile. (http://www.datapointed.net/2012/01/maps-of-sparsely-populated-us-census-blocks/)
the West (as it is in other places, of course), but its limited supply in the face of vast agricultural activity and surging populations poses a major question for the future. Much of California’s water is stored in snow that falls over the state’s rainy season, from September to June. This is the Sierra Nevada snowpack from the winter of 2013.
the Desert” Sunday, March 2, 14 Our postdoctoral researcher Nicholas Bauch is a geographer who has been retracing the work of an early 20th century photographer in the Grand Canyon. His research method involves infographics as both an inquiry method and a form of digital scholarly publication.
the Grand Canyon in a set of images that used an early form of slide projector to give viewers across the country the chance to tour the canyon virtually.
of time lining up the view points of the 44 images in Peabody’s Grand Canyon slide show, attempting to line up the exact location, orientation and focal length of the lens Peabody used in taking the images. He used Google Earth to match the locations (upper left), and Natural Scene Designer to perform a “viewshed analysis,” (upper right) which paints the landscape dark red to indicate areas that would be visible from a particular photograph.
#3 (of 44) Sunday, March 2, 14 At upper left is the original photograph, lower left is the Natural Scene Designer rendering built from digital elevation models, and at right is the viewshed analysis of the same picture.
placed the original photos on a page with the viewshed analusis and digital recreations. We used these to help line up perspectives. The tower in the near distance had broken off from the canyon’s rim since Peabody’s photo was taken, making it impossible or at least very dangerous to try to pose on the top as the original picture showed.
captured by Peabody, then as recreated by my DSLR (with a different lens, which explains the imperfect matchup), the Natural Scene Designer rendering, and the viewshed. The view camera negative is developed but I don’t have a digital copy of our “official” rephotograph yet.
scholarly work, the website called “Enchanting the Desert” that is currently in development. The pages combine the original photographs with pixel-by-pixel analyses, the viewshed analysis and maps showing related landmarks. The site will be available later this year at EnchantingtheDesert.com.
and off elements on an image, from place labels and trail overlays to hand- tints done by the photographer. IMAGERY IN LAYERS The key is to allow users to explore the flat space of the image and see how far away from the view point different features are. Sunday, March 2, 14 The photographs will be displayed so that you can interact with them, revealing and even clicking on features on the landscape.
“The Long Draw” Sunday, March 2, 14 As long as we’re in the Grand Canyon, I’ll jump to another project the Bill Lane Center did that relied on interpreting the landscape, in this case to solve a historical artistic mystery.
was working on a story for Harpers’ magazine, exploring the legacy of a much respected German cartographer Friedrich von Egloffstein. He was a Bavarian count who came to the United States and participated in several significant expeditions into the American West. Here we took two of his maps of the American southwest and “georeferenced” them onto present day geographic space. They are overlaid on imagery in Google Earth.
of the halftone” for his seminal work representing shaded relief on flat paper, was very respected as a cartographer, his reputation as a landscape artist had fallen into disrepute. Why? Because illustrations he did while on a mission exploring the Grand Canyon showed little or no resemblance to the actual landscape. The dean of western literature Wallace Stegner, writing a century later, guessed that the German had lost his mind in the majesty of the western landscape and could not accurately portray what he saw. Here, in this interactive feature for Harpers’, we outline the criticisms of Egloffstein’s work and show how they don’t match the landscape at all.
our story, was convinced that Egloffstein was the victim of an archiving error. He believed that the drawings said to be done in the Grand Canyon (in what would become Arizona), were actually drawn five years earlier, and more than 300 miles away in Colorado.
the Black Canyon of the Gunnison river in Colorado, and worked with the photographer Lena Herzog to capture images that lined up Egloffstein’s perspectives very convincingly. (This interface lets the user explore the comparisons) Before it was renamed the Gunnison after an army captain who lost his life leading an expedition exploring it, the Gunnison river was called the Grand, its canyon then being the “Canyon of the Grand” – which might have led the US Congress in the 1800s to misfile Eglofstein’s drawings as having been done on the Grand Canyon - the famous one on the Colorado River. This story was intended to right that historical wrong (there is not universal consensus on this interpretation, I should add!)
California’s Delta as it Was” Sunday, March 2, 14 This next project is another visual and journalistic exercise in landscape interpretation, looking at a vital ecosystem for the state of California.
of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers in north-central California. Their delta is reversed from the usual direction as it gets narrower toward the mouth of San Francisco bay, into which the two rivers flow.
and drained for navigation, flood control and farmland over the past 150 years. At center top is the housing development “Discovery Bay,” which promised an inland marina to residents.
Environment radically altered over 160 years • How would you restore it? First, you need to know what it looked like • Let users explore the evidence, learn about research process The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Sunday, March 2, 14 The historical ecology project examining the delta was oriented towards a future possible effort to restore it to a healthier state of being.
reconstruct Delta "as it was" • Partners: San Francisco Estuary Institute and KQED Quest • Scientists shared authorship: “Partners”, not just “sources” A Collaboration of Journalists and Scientists Sunday, March 2, 14 I worked together with a science and environment reporter from San Francisco public media and scientists from a research institute, who had spent several years gathering historical information on the delta and how it looked over the past decades and centuries. This kind of collaboration went beyond using them as a source, they were truly co-authors of our story, a model we would like to promote and advocate for as science journalism faces staff and resource cutbacks.
were distributed and ecological functions were maintained within the native California landscape. Understanding how streams, wetlands, and woodlands were organized along physical gradients helps scientists and managers develop new strategies for more integrated and functional landscape management Sunday, March 2, 14
collaborators at the San Francisco Estuary Institute had compiled to tell the story of 160 years of the delta and its ecosystem – incidentally a history of California itself, from the Spanish mission era to gold mining to the agricultural explosion.
scoured every type of data they could get, from explorer’s notebooks to historical newspapers to archival photography and maps. Data inputs included LIDAR scans by airplane of the present-day landscape, which showed traces of previous land features, like ponds, forests and small channels.
Though the author of the letter and this map gets a few of the facts wrong (e.g., Cache Creek did not connect directly to Cache Slough), he does convey the character of the basin landscape. To describe the pattern and his map, George Browning (1851) states that the land near the river descends (the dark pencil hashes), ” then comes the Tola or Bull Rush [stipples]...and then comes the Lake or Pond [marked with ‘L’].” (Browning 1851, courtesy of The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley) Historical Documents and Accounts Sunday, March 2, 14
collected observations into a geographic information system that modelled what the delta probably looked like in 1800. This geodatabase became the basis for an interactive map that we created for KQED’s readers to explore the historical ecology of the Delta.
of an interactive map, but I wanted to be sure to enable users to have a more satisfying narrative experience than a map with clickable pins in it. The result was a sort of e-book, where people could navigate directly through the map or by moving from “page” to “page,” each of which was a map view with a different basemap and annotation displayed in a layout that I defined so as to showcase the relevant point most effectively. The last “page” gave the users the freedom to explore the map and its layers at will.
“Shifting Landscapes in the Bay Area” Sunday, March 2, 14 If the previous projects were about reading the history of the area through its landscape, this next project looks at potential changes to the landscape in the future.
tree (sequoia sempervirens), which is a remarkable feature of the California landscape. These trees endure long stretches without rain by “drinking” fog that rolls in from the Pacific Ocean. In the 19th century, abundant local redwoods were almost entirely clear cut to build the city of San Francisco, but they bounced back and now dominate the Santa Cruz mountains to the south and west of Silicon Valley. The oldest remaining specimens are thousands of years old. The oldest and largest redwoods were the subject of a National Geographic cover story last year.
a region that rightly prides itself on setting aside land from development. Over the past century and a half, a million acres – comprising a third of the nine-county area - has been permanently preserved as open space. Here is a timeline that visualizes research done by our postdoctoral scholar Maria Santos, chronicling the preservation of open space properties over time. We published this timeline on KQED as part of a project on the future of Bay Area landscapes. (blogs.kqed.org/science/2013/09/09/warming-climate-could-transform-bay-area-parks-and-open-space/)
offered a sobering perspective that dampened the celebration of the Bay Areas’ conservation achievements. This graphic visualizes climate models developed by the Berkeley ecologist David Ackerly. They point to the ominous possibility that despite all the open space devoted to them in perpetuity, warming temperatures could kill off the vast majority of coast redwoods within the next 100 years (given the IPCC scenario of a 7.5º F average rise in temperatures).
Earth “EcoWest: The Environmental State of the West” Sunday, March 2, 14 A project we’re working on to give people an up-to-date infographic view of the North American West is a dashboard and series of interactive graphics on western environmental conditions.
that has been aggregating public data on environmental conditions in the western US, we’ve created a standardized infographic template for loading and displaying environmental data. We are collecting those interactives in a “dashboard” that creates a narrative flow around the major environmental concerns of our time. You can click from one interactive to the next, one dashboard to the next.
individual infographics to embed in your own website or blog. One of the major design challenges was to use responsive design to create layouts that would work at a wide range of canvas sizes.
Metrics: Managing Groundwater” Sunday, March 2, 14 We’ve talked about exploring and analyzing the past, about displaying present conditions and about providing a view of the possible future. This next project is our first foray into anything resembling advocacy (from which our nonprofit university status effectively bars us). Advocacy in this case means calling for data – data to be collected and shared on a critical western environmental issue.
As I mentioned before, California is in the grip of a drought the likes of which has not been seen in 500 years. In a year without ample snowpack to melt down from the Sierras and fill the reservoirs this spring, where will farmers get their water for a $20 billion agriculture industry.
law, no metrics are shared (or sometimes even collected) about how much water farmers are pumping from the ground. As the saying goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. And from our perspective at a research center, you can’t analyze what you didn’t measure. At this time, our best information comes from remote sensing done by NASA and other country satellites. But this isn’t North Korea we’re talking about, it’s the West’s breadbasket. Working with the California Water Foundation, we’ve been asked to build a set of information graphics explaining the importance of groundwater data. The target audience for these is state legislators and regulators who may have a real chance of passing new laws in the coming year. Already Governor Jerry Brown has asked the California Water Foundation to organize sessions to educate lawmakers on the issues with groundwater.
produce on California groundwater will be fed directly into informing the legislative and political processes. The animation above is a very rough sketch of the type of user experience we are planning to put in front of water managers. Again, while this is in some ways advocacy, it is simply in the name of transparency and accountability: collecting and sharing vital information about a shared resource: water. moreover, it would only bring California into compliance with practices observed throughout other parched western states.
Influence Media designed to inform public policy decisions Sunday, March 2, 14 To circle back to developments in data visualization over the past several years, one is a trend that others have observed before me: the use of data vis and interactivity to advocate for a cause. This may indeed be a format that we will see a great deal more of in coming years. While I think that data vis at its core is about exploring ideas and searching for the truth – as opposed to shaping facts to fit a desired conclusion – I think that done judiciously data vis arguments can be a powerful and responsible way of engaging audiences around important issues.
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