An Historic Night in Infographics

Last night’s election capped off a landmark period in U. S. politics…and visual representations of information. Over the past eighteen months we’ve seen more floating pie charts and interactive maps than you can shake a stick at. My news sources of choice, the New York Times (online) and CNN (broadcast) have outdone themselves at serving up data in new ways—sometimes to brilliant effect, as with the Times’ debate transcript analyzer :

and sometimes in ways that are um, bold…but embarrassing:

Of course mainstream news sources like the New York Times and CNN aren’t the only ones serving it up. Designoblog has a nice collection of election graphic highlights from sources including Good Magazine and An Orange America. And sites like FiveThirtyEight and Perspctv sprang up to satisfy the nation’s thirst for data representation.

Despite our short attention spans, it would appear that Americans are craving data. We want to experience it: poke it, flip it, and remix it (online) or watch someone else do that (on air). The New York Times and IBM are even offering ways for readers to roll their own graphics, through their new Visualization Lab. So far the options are kind of canned and flat. But the direction is promising (wouldn’t this make a great way for design students to play with displays of information?)

So even though the election cycle has come to an end, leaving us to nurse our withdrawal, we can rest assured that our nation’s pie charts will never be the same. They’ll carry on interactive-er, 3D-er and more tricked out than ever before.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 3:48 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

---

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website