The info poster below is a larger view of what was included in the supplement prototype packaging that I posted yesterday.

For each piece printed, the preview image of the storyboard (this one being the Thursday visualisation) would be the preview to what’s printed on the opposite side of the page, thereby allowing the poster to be hung either side for a more informative view, or a more visual view.

Well one idea I had was a supplement piece, with accompanying package containing a fullsize A1 print every week for six weeks. This way the One week of the Guardian project is contained in it’s own package, with accompanying information which tells the story of the project, and a poster of a piece of work to encourage people to collect the whole series.

Inside the envelope, the A1 print would be folded down to A5 size, 4 folds in half each time. Printed on the back of the visualisation for that day would be a storyboard with project information, the same for each day so that if a reader jumped on board half way through the issues, they would still know what’s going on.

A rough scale of things would look something like this.

I was thinking it might be nice to have these supplemental packages published next year on the dates they were created, as a time capture looking back one year ago using data visualisations. A hypothetical fantasy, but a nice one I think.

The texture of the paper is not unlike newsprint, though there’s a larger grain to the paper, and it feels just slightly thicker. It’s difficult to see I know, but my digi-cam is a cheap useless one that’s about 4 years old, and photography isn’t my forte.

To see it up close it looks as though it came straight out of the paper, which is great, and after handling it my hands were inky black! Not sure I’ll be able to mass print these though as printing it on the plotter has to be done overnight. Perhaps a limited edition of 10 if people want? I know some have already contacted me via email about getting prints, and if demand is strong enough then I guess archival ink on semi-gloss might be a better choice.

I have a presentation in a couple of days about this project. I’m trying to put together some sort of list of frequently asked questions in order to give a better presentation of the work. I know what my aim was, and I can understand the choices I’ve made being as I’m the one that made them, but is there anything about this project that you don’t understand or would like further clarification about?

This is your chance to get stuck in and really tell me what you think. If you need your memory jogging work can be found via the designlab.

What don’t you understand?

Thanks.

The NYTimes has a nice clean infographic on what the presidential candidates have raised and spent.

Another one from the NYTimes, this one shows the fatalities of a year in Iraq. The NYTimes has alot of really nice infographics. Alot.

The black holes of the internet. Very nice.

The Economist has an infographic about how the world consumes petrol per day.

A series of infographics created by Clarence Larkin using biblical data to explain various religious concepts.

Interactive infographic on Portfolio.com showing the generosity of countries who give aid to charity around the world.

Another religous visualisation, this time by Chris Harrison.

An American Self Portrait by Chris Jordan uses photo compositions to depict statistical goings on in everyday America.

Death and Taxes shows the allocation of federal taxes in the US to it’s divisions and organisations who claim over $200m annually.

Dugg Analytics uses the DiggAPI to visualise a bunch of different data from Digg.com.

Eskimoblood has a pretty nice visualisation of Flickr group members built with Processing.

RadicalCartography shows a map of the crops in the US.

BillyBob has a nice little chart of what happened during a 30 minute CNN broadcast.

I love these static relationship visualisations by Mark Lombardi.

Tuur Van Balen has a nice visualisation project where actual items are mapped onto a plan of a city.

Skin colour map of the world. Simple but nice.

Another visualisation from the NYTimes, this one shows the profitability of movies at the box office.

Presidential Watch ‘08 has a nice map of political blogs and how they link to one another.

Ian Dapot visualises The Force of Things by author relationships and ideas.

And lastly, a nice little pyramid/hierarchy of zombie needs.

Other data visualisation finds

• Smashing Magazine: Data Visualization and Infographics
• JohnGrimwade.com
• Information-Graphics @ StumbleUpon.com
• SEER consumer relationships visualisation video
• Visualizing: tracing an aesthetics of data
• The best tools for visualisation

• A very short statement about the work
• An image of 1024x768 AND 2048x1536 for publicity for the show
• Your project work
• A presentation about the project including background, contextual and theoretical research, what I am making, how I am making it, why I am making it
• Sketchbooks and/or working notes and files
• 2x printed A2 storyboards

To make things easier for me to remember, and also help with the presentation, I’m gathering up everything required into one post.

A short statement about the work

DTN is a series of experiments which visually explore the news in various ways to encourage new ways of seeing a predominantly text based medium.

Publicity images

For the publicity images for the show, I chose to use the boat image for a headline about pollution as I feel it best sums up what I am trying to show. It is a graphical representation of a headline, which shows subtle details of the story in the composition.

Your project work

The DesignLab showcases all of the completed work so far, contained in posts which describe how and why I did what I did for each piece of work.

Research and theory

Background: When I started the project my initial idea was to create a piece of artwork every 1-2 days based on what was in the newspapers. When my project expanded, I tried to decide what I wanted to say with each image, with the style and the amount of detail.

Eventually I wanted to create some visualisations of the news. When I researched into visualisations, I discovered alot of what I was planning to do had already been done before, and didn’t feel the need to re-invent the wheel. As I still wanted to experiment with visualisations, I decided to look into static visualisations. Extracting information out of a newspaper for a specific period of time, one week, and creating a series of static visualisations focusing on the weight of the story, the content and theme, the author, the position it appears in the paper, the category, and more.

Research: For the illustrated images I have been mainly looking at different graphic styles and ways of reducing information into its most simple form. To take a headline/story and represent it as a single image without the message being lost is alot about taking the strongest most important points of a story, and focusing on communicating them. With my experiments I have found that over complicating the image with too many elements often misleads the message, as the end user ends up focusing on some insignificant detail rather than the main message.

For the static visualisations, I’ve been looking alot at dynamic visualisations and how they work, what kind of visualisations they produce. Edward Tufte’s book ‘Envisioning Information’ has some interesting ways of mapping complex data, and alot of nautical maps hold some excellent ideas too. Currently I’ve been working on weighting categories and items in news, and simplifying the paper. From the statistics collected so far, even without them being visualised, there are interesting trends to be noticed and further developed.

What I am making: A series of experiments which encourage new ways of visualising a predominantly text based medium. The visuals look at reducing and expanding news to give either a ‘quick message hit’, or further insight into a headline/story. Presented as desktop wallpapers and posters, the images are intended to be used as accompaniment to newspaper articles to encourage a wider audience to dialect about a subject more than a standalone article might.

How I am making it: As the work I’m doing is very graphical, the programs I’ve been using are mainly Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. For some of the visualisations, I’ve been collecting statistics by updating a spreadsheet in OpenOffice, and then using some online tools such as ManyEyes by IBM to see how the data works in a standard dynamic visual.

Why I am making it: Sometimes a headline isn’t enough to attract a reader to an article, and images are used to give a reader further insight and set the scene. I thought that if I could represent the most important elements of the article in a single image, whether the reader actually read the article wouldn’t matter, as they would know by looking at the image what the article was about.

Depending on the complexity of the image, a quick look at the image may offer a user one or two important points. A longer look may offer a user an idea of how the images’ elements are interacting with one another, giving a visual picture of how the headline comes together. For some of the more detailed images, subtle article details are embedded only to be noticed by those who take an engaged approach to understanding the composition.

For the static visualisations, I thought it was interesting to capture a moment in time, instead of having a dynamic visual which changes whenever a new story is published. As I didn’t know what would happen in the one week I recorded the data, it was quite interesting to think what could have happened. For example, if this project was conducted in the week of September 3, 1939, it would have recorded the date when England and France declared war on Germany, or any other significant date in history. However, if a major event like this had happened it wouldn’t have given a true account of what happens in the news the rest of the time. Having a rather major event free news week means the spread of news topics would be on average the same as any other day of the year, giving a clearer picture of what the news is in the UK during this time.

Sketchbooks and/or working notes and files

I have a hell of a lot of notes and idea sketching which I’m not scanning in or posting. Mainly because if I did you wouldn’t be able to decipher my chicken scratch anyhow.

Printed A2 Storyboards

The storyboards can be previewed in PDF format by clicking on the images below. They very briefly explain the project, and showcase some of the work completed so far.

UPDATE: After the review

Well I had my review the other day. All seemed to go pretty well. On the whole it helped me to clarify a few things.

• What function does the project serve? The project is about visually editing headlines, stories, and newspapers to try to communicate what the subject is about more effectively. Images which appear with news stories are usually there to set the scene or give identity to a character, but what I am trying to do is merge the text and the images into one composition which communicates the facts, and removes the opinion and the unclear.
• What are the outcomes? Two main strands of work: Visually editing individual news headlines, and creating static visualisations of newspapers as a whole. The headlines will be presented as desktop wallpapers and postcards, and the static visualisations will be printed as large format posters.
• Why static visuals and not dynamic? There are many other existing projects that create dynamic visuals. For example, the ManyEyes visualisations I created show the data but not styled in the context of the subject. A particularly bad week of news with lots of murder and violence may be dynamically coloured in bright happy colours, not representative of the stories. Plus I don’t want to automate the process. There is a human editor at the top of the newspaper hierarchy who decides what goes in a paper and what doesn’t, so I want to become the visual editor deciding what best commmunicates the story in terms of image compositions.

Gin Lane took one of the most talked about subjects of the time, and boiled it all down to one image which told all of the story. In the image there are three significant buildings; a distiller, a pawnbroker, and an undertakers, which representated the path the Gin drinkers were on.

Quick image analysis

Most striking is the image of the woman on the steps, intoxicated and unable to take care of her child. To the right of this woman is a man who looks ill and hungry, yet he’s clutching a bottle of Gin. Up from the man looks to be a woman who is giving her baby Gin. Just up from that, the crowd are having to be beaten back from the distillers by a man with a broom. Above the distillers shows a cut away of a building where we can see a man has hanged himself, and further down the street a building which looks about ready to collapse. We can only assume that the Gin addiction these people are going through has relieved them of all sense and responsibilities. In the background people are being measured up for coffins in the street, presumably because the undertakers are too full to measure up inside, and in the left hand foreground, people selling their posessions in order to buy more Gin.

Thoughts

This image is pretty much doing back then what newspaper cartoonists are trying to do today, only with todays cartoonists they usually have a very small space to fill and can get nowhere near as much detail as Hogarth did. Something I’m going to look into after I get the One Week of The Guardian out of the way is to look more into simplifying complex subjects with images.

From what I’ve found out, the average book length is about 80,000 words, at 250 words to a page, that’s about 320 pages, or about 2.3x less than the amount of words in a weeks worth of the Guardian newspaper.

So for every week that passes, you can either read the newspaper everyday, or replace the newspaper for a book. Two books infact, lots of short stories, or one huge big novel. You’ll have to decide what’s more important; updated news, or some classic stories.

How long will it take me to read the average book?

I guess that just depends on how fast you read. Luckily, the internet being the internet, you can take a 60 second test to find out just that. Then take your average reading speed, divide it by the average number of words in a book (or if you have a specific book you want to find out, multiply the number of pages by 250 to find the average wordcount) then divide it by 60 to convert the total into hours, and that’s how long it takes for you to read a book (minus distractions, making a brew, looking up words you don’t understand, slaying vampires, etc., etc.).

Incase anyone’s interested, I seem to read at about 350 words per minute. (Although I’ve been reading Band Of Brothers for about 3 years… I’m savouring it!)

UK NEWS – 2706 / 541.2 / 11.73% / 98.65mm
RAF and navy hardest hit by £4.5bn MoD cuts – 872 / p4
Miliband urged to regulate private military — 475 / p9
Brown hints at taking powers from Holyrood – 337 / p10
Sick veterans being let down, say MPs – 316 / p10
Brown and Cameron woo farmers’ union – 706 / p13

Having the data in a spreadsheet means I can filter out the information I need to create visuals with the information. Some of the information I’ve been looking at include the total amount of words in the category, the average article length by author, category, day etc, the percentage of the newspaper occupied, total amount of words, total no of pages, total amount of pages containing news, most popular stories, most popular categories, etc. etc. etc. Now that I have the info, it’s just about using it.

And now for the maths

This gets rather tedious after a while, but here’s an example of how I’ve been extracting the data for a couple of filters.

• Story averages for each category =
  Total No. of words in the category / Total No. of stories
• Total category percentages =
  (Total No. of words in the category / Total No. of words in all categories) * 100
• Total amount of vertical space category should hold on an A1 poster =
  Height of A1 poster (841mm) * 0. Total category precentages)

Barebones data

Even without creating the visuals, just having all of the news printed in the Guardian for one week is pretty interesting to see. Already you can see the trends in the news, and how the paper ranks the news depending on the position it is printed, and the amount of words for the stories.

After speaking with Steve and David and getting a review of my project, they both seemed to find the One Day of The Guardian piece pretty interesting. Although I rushed through the piece, and graphically I’m not a huge fan of it, it seemed to provoke some interesting discussion.

Since then, I’ve decided to create a ‘One Week of The Guardian’ which I’ve already started working on. This series will use various pieces of information I can pull from the paper, and display them in different ways on different days.

For this series, I will index all of the news from the paper, and remove all of the other elements of the paper that are not. i.e. Adverts, articles with no cited author, comics, consumer reviews, horoscopes, promotions, puzzles, prize give-aways, reader responses and letters to the paper, stock index charts, and weather reports.

In the previous version, I included the obituaries. However, in this version I have omitted the obits as I decided that someone dying of natural causes or disease isn’t really news, but if a person dies in suspicious circumstances then it would be included in other sections of the paper under subject headings that are indexed in the piece.

I will be categorising the news according to where it is posted in the Guardian newspaper and on the Guardian website, but only using one depth of categorisation, the most relevant one.