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

lensblr:

FANTASTIC VIDEO by @washingtonpost’s multimedia team on the birth of the U.S. space program. As former astronaut Robert Crippen said about America’s first shuttle launch: “It was obvious that this was a big deal not only for the country, but for the world.”

Read the story by Joel Achenbach »

Get the backstory on this video »

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

jdavidake:

Live photo of live Presidential TV address.

Yesterday The AP (AP) shot the televised Presidential address to the nation. That wouldn’t be news except it’s never happen before. At least no one can remember it ever happening. In the past still photographers were escorted into the room after the televised speech. The President might reread part of the speech for the still photographers or he might just stare at them. This tradidtion dates back at least to the Truman administration when President Truman would read his speech first for radio and then again for the noisy newsreel and still cameras. The issue preventing shooting the live address has always been the sound of the shutters and the movement of the still photographers. Not anymore.

More background how this changed and why can be found here: http://www.nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2011/06/potus_speak.html

This is a quick look at how we did it. The first frame is a Canon 5D Mark II all wrapped up in a soft sound dampening blimp.  We mounted the camera on a tripod under the main television camera and using live view mode tripped the shutter with a hard-wired cable from across the room while the President spoke.  The rig was completely silent.

The second frame is the President’s view of the rig from the podium.

The photographer in the room firing the camera was Pablo Martinez Monsivais. You can see him in the third frame. He wasn’t allowed to move during the speech so he shot the 45 degree angle and tripped the remote camera from this position.

The last frame is the final product from the remote camera. 

Times they are a changin’… 

(Source: paid2see)

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.

Pretty amazing New York Times video based on footage taken by Spc. Michael Gannon as his unit worked through a mine field in Afghanistan. As Gannon’s helmet camera films, one of his men is injured in a blast. Hat tip to Garance Franke-Ruta, who tweets: “Was there ever anything like this for other wars?” 

When Apple announced early last year that it would not support Flash on the iPhone and iPad, a passionate conversation erupted in the world of web development: Was Flash dead? If not, how would it survive? When should it be used? News developers asked these questions as well, and, at least in our newsroom, the conversation inspired some thinking about how to approach interactive development. Over the past year and a half, there has been steady movement toward more interactivity based on JavaScript and fewer Flash-only experiences.

Last week we published a graphic that compared four federal budget proposals through a series of charts. We used the jQuery library Flot to draw simple, interactive line charts that showed how the debt and deficit would change under the different plans. Flot is very easy to use, flexible and customizable, and is one of many free-to-use JavaScript graphing libraries out there (Dracula, Highcharts and RGraph are a few others). We also built a customized chart with CSS and JavaScript at the bottom of the page to show how different categories of spending would be affected.

“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)

In a Washington Post investigation published Saturday, reporter Debbie Cenziper chronicled the waste and mismanagement of affordable-housing projects across the nation. Cenziper, as part of her reporting, visited sites where construction and renovation projects funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had been delayed or abandoned. For our part, we needed to find a way to take Post readers to these locations. Enter Google Street View.
 
We used the photographic mapping service to look up some of the project sites and realized that we could now visually confirm Cenziper’s findings for Post readers. Many of the addresses showed panoramas of overgrown brush, piles of dirt or undeveloped, grassy fields. After Cenziper got in touch with developers on the projects, we created a graphic on washingtonpost.com that featured the Street View shots, the funding amount for each project and a summary of each project’s history. We used Street View for local sites, such as Temple Hills, and sites across the country, such as Anaheim, Calif.

The Google Maps API makes adding Street View panoramas simple and intuitive, even if you have little or no Javascript knowledge. Check out this page for more information on how to do it.

Here are some other examples of how news sites can use Google’s service as a storytelling tool: