On Innovation

This week we launched the Better/Worse Life Project, which looks at population growth, unemployment and median income across the country over the past 30 years and uses that data as a background to frame the very simple, open question ‘Is life in your state getting better or worse?’

It uses your IP address to automatically detect your county and state so that we can ask you about the area that’s most relevant to you at the moment.

After we have your vote, we ask for a couple of simple demographics – age and race – and display a visualization that shows where your state falls on the scale from better to worse based on the votes we’ve gathered. You can then filter the responses based on race and age, or sort the states based on unemployment, median income or population growth, to see if there is trending based on these metrics.

This is one of the first projects to take users opinions and mash them up with actual data to see whether perceptions match up with reality.  It’s a fascinating window into how people feel about the places where they live and a forum for a conversation around how things are changing.

There are already some patterns emerging.  We are starting to see that, in general, more states with high unemployment are being rated ‘worse’ by users, and more places with low unemployment are being rated ‘better’. 

D.C. stands out – though unemployment is high, 83 percent of users (as of publication of this post) ranked it better. One left a comment after rating it ‘better’: “DC is better due to a higher number of permanent residents, community activism, and better stewardship. Welcome to the 21st century!” The comments on why people voted the way they did have been some of the most interesting results of the project we’ve seen so far.

This kind of presentation can be risky. It’s so dependent on user feedback that if no one participates, there will be nothing interesting to look at. But it’s worth the chance – the kind of fascinating information we can gather once it does get going is possible only when you open the doors to participation from users. We’re collecting information on counties in addition to states so that, if we get a lot of responses, we can display a profile of the state that shows whether residents think counties are getting better or worse. It is going to take a lot of responses to get feedback for over 3,000 counties, but it might be possible with your help.

Right now, we have about 4,000 responses, but we need many more. Rate your state here: http://wapo.st/betterworselife

- Kat Downs / Innovations Editor for Graphics

VISUALIZATION OF THE DAY: Twitter releases data from Japan earthquake (via Faster Forward)

And a reminder that as quickly as free data tools come online, they often disappear. So keep your data!

TimelineSetter View more presentations from a_l

How do golf pros play the Congressional Country Club course? Check out this U.S. Open interactive graphic plotting PGA shots from 2007 to 2009. You can analyze how each hole has played or view stats by player.

After 30 years, D.C.’s metrorail map is getting a makeover, inspiring all sorts of interesting redesign ideas. BUT, what if the makeover also focused on an interactive experience built around WMATA routes?

Enter Mapnificent, a fascinating app developed by German programmer Stefan Wehrmeyer. It lets you map areas accessible to you by public transit within a certain amount of time. A really cool way to think about asking maps new questions, like: how many hair salons are within 15 minutes of my workplace? (answer: at least a dozen!)

via Mapnificent: A time-based transit map | The Economist

“Our lives are being driven by data, and the presentation of that data is an opportunity for us to make some amazing interfaces that tell great stories,” says Aaron Koblin in this TED talk. He covers lots of interesting projects that are great food for thought as we think about how to bring readers into the storytelling process.

futurejournalismproject:

Data can be a great storytelling tool, as Google’s Aaron Koblin explains in his 2011 TED Talk. However, it’s the interface, and how we get to comprehend and massage the data that determines how useful it can be.

19th century culture was defined by the novel, 20th century culture by cinema, 21st century culture will be defined by the interface. 

(Source: brainpickings.org, via futurejournalismproject)

futurejournalismproject:

Ever want to read what the non-English press is talking about around the world? Say, for example, the local press in North Africa and the Middle East over the past few months.

Enter Newspaper Map, it combines Google Maps and Google Translate to present the world’s online news sources all in one place. 

(Source: futurejournalismproject)

I was out of the office when this @WSJ tweet charting unemployment got everyone on our social team buzzing: How’d they do that? 

Anil Dash tips his hat to Zach Seward for embracing an innovative idea and running with it: “The results really do an effective job of showing how compelling news can be when it embraces a new medium instead of fighting against its constraints.”  

If you’re interested in creating your own SparkTweet, Zach explains how it’s done and shares best practices here.

Amanda Zamora / social and engagement editor (hat tip Justin Bank)

The Gitmo leaks

The Washington Post, McClatchy, the New York Times and National Public Radio all published stories today on the Guantanamo Bay detainees. The Post disclosed new details on the whereabouts of al-Qaeda leaders on 9/11 and in the months immediately afterward. McClatchy focused on the government’s creation of a largely ineffective “human intelligence laboratory.”

NYT and NPR’s stories and digital presentations take a broad look at the information revealed in the documents and create useful digital interactives to show patterns. (The Post sourced its documents from Wikileaks, while the NYT and NPR have said they obtained the same documents from a different source.) 

From an innovations perspective, the idea of a NYT-NPR cooperative effort itself is intriguing. It looks as though both organizations built separate interactives that point to the same set of documents. Those documents are hosted on a co-branded NYT project site and make good use of the DocumentCloud viewer. In times of fast news and limited resources, that kind of cooperation makes a lot of sense. It’s an efficiency newsrooms might have never considered several years ago, especially with a competitive story such as this. Each of these four news organization’s different approaches offer different angles into the stories behind the data. In the end, that’s great for journalism. 

Cory Haik / Deputy Editor, Universal News