Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Oil Spill Continued
There's a lot of material on the oil spill right now, so I decided I want to talk about a couple more graphics about the spill. This graphic designed by Carol Zuber-Mallison has more information than any source I have looked at.
This app for Google World is absolutely mind blowing and presents an incredibly simple yet powerful message about the oil spill.
The first graphic is also amazing in its own way. It is also a little bit overwhelming. The graphic has a timeline, pie charts, bar graphs, line graphs and other data representation methods that I don't know the names of. The amount of information presented on this graphic would take pages and pages of text to describe in any sort of comprehensible manner. The problem is that the information should take several pages of graphics too. The designer tried so hard to pack as much information as she could into the graphic that she made it nearly impossible to follow. So many of the graphs are intertwined with other graphs that it is hard to understand what is happening.
The graphic would be easier to understand if it was printed out on a large sheet of paper because it would be easier to rapidly look at different graphs and charts quickly, which would make it easier to associate different data. To me, it doesn't seem like this was designed well for the web. With my laptop screen I can only see a small portion of image at any given moment. Perhaps with a larger screen, or multiple monitors I would be able to comprehend the graphic on the computer as well as I can read it on paper.
So far I've just been trashing the graphic, but it's not as bad as it sounds. The main issue is that it is not well designed for the medium which which it is most commonly viewed. I don't think that it is possible to make a graphic this large and have it still be appropriate for viewing on a computer screen. The designer could have created several different graphics that were sized appropriately. She could have had an separate graphic for the timeline, the map, the environmental hazards, the economic costs, the opinion polls and any other category listed on the chart.
The Google Earth app is incredible. I haven't seen anything else that can put the size of the oil spill into perspective the way the app can. Last post I looked at some animations that showed how the oil spill moved across the ocean. Even though those pictures showed where the spill was and how large it was, it was difficult to put the size of the spill into perspective. When I saw that the spill reached from an hour and a half drive south to an hour and a half drive north I realized how large of an area the spill covered. When I realized that the oil was several inches deep in places, the size of the became even more clear and even more frightening.
These two sources both share the goal of demonstrating how large and destructive the spill can be, but they go about it in different ways. The first graphic, in its current state, is too overwhelming to be useful, but it has the potential to be useful if it is optimized for viewing on the computer. The Google Earth app is an amazing, creative use of new technology that gives us a perspective of the oil spill that would have been nearly impossible as recently as a year ago.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Oil Spill
Today I'm going to look into oil problems that we're having in the Gulf of Mexico right now. An explosion occurred on an oil drilling on April 20th. 11 people died in the explosion and more wer injured. The blowout preventer, which was supposed to prevent any leaks failed, so oil has been gushing out of the ocean floor for a few weeks and is approaching the American coast. We'll look at two different sources, an animated graphic from the New York Times and a video.
Click here to see an animated graphic showing the path of the oil as it spreads across the Gulf towards land.
The video is embedded below.
I really like the animated graphic. The NYT seems to do a good job with their graphics. They tend to be clear and accurate, unlike the USA Today graphic I discussed in an earlier post. The graphic is a compilation of picture, and viewing them in sequence allows us to see the change in the position of the oil over time. If the transitions between days were smooth the graphic would be even more effective. Sometimes it was difficult for me to understand why the oil was moving in a certain direction, so smoother transitions could help. Also, if general currents or weather systems that have a large impact on the oil movement had been included it would have been easier for me to understand trends that would have allowed me to predict future effects of the oil.
I did like how the graphic included a little bit of text to narrate the story presented by the graphic. The text made it easy to understand when important events happened and how long people had been working on specific strategies. An issue I had with the combination was that the speed of the slideshow was too fast to read the text and fully appreciate the map. It seemed as if the speed had been designed for people looking at either just the map or reading just the text. I couldn't look back and forth with the automatic rate from the play button. Fortunately, The speed can be controlled manually, so I was able to work through the slideshow at my own pace.
The video has a graphic similar to the NYT graphic. The graphic showing the area of the spill is shown about a minute into the video. This graphic is animated more smoothly than the NYT graphic, and lets us see the progression of the oil spill in a way that we can easily recognized trends. This graphic does seem to be less accurate than the NYT graphic because the NYT graphic was not as smoothly and perfectly formed as the ABC one. The irregularity of nature probably would not have produced an oild spill as regular as the one displayed by ABC.
The ABC report focuses on the current issues rather than taking the timeline-like approach that the NYT takes. This is fine because it allows the video to focus on the specific problems like oil in the wetlands, which would be impossible if they tried to cover the events of the previous few weeks.
The video allows them to show the actual damage to the wetlands and wildlife. This part of the video creates powerful emotional argument. We can see the suffering and dead animals, so we are obviously eager to stop the oil from spreading. Unfortunately, as the video also tells us, there are not many options for stopping the spread, and it may take weeks or months until the flow is finally stopped.
A combination of the two graphics would have created the most effective graphic. With a combination we would have had an accurate graphic, but one that was easy to follow through time. The text from the NYT would have allowed us to easily place events in time and understand the complexity and size of the disaster. Both graphics do turn the event into one that can be compared to other disasters in a way that is impossible from other media sources.
Click here to see an animated graphic showing the path of the oil as it spreads across the Gulf towards land.
The video is embedded below.
I really like the animated graphic. The NYT seems to do a good job with their graphics. They tend to be clear and accurate, unlike the USA Today graphic I discussed in an earlier post. The graphic is a compilation of picture, and viewing them in sequence allows us to see the change in the position of the oil over time. If the transitions between days were smooth the graphic would be even more effective. Sometimes it was difficult for me to understand why the oil was moving in a certain direction, so smoother transitions could help. Also, if general currents or weather systems that have a large impact on the oil movement had been included it would have been easier for me to understand trends that would have allowed me to predict future effects of the oil.
I did like how the graphic included a little bit of text to narrate the story presented by the graphic. The text made it easy to understand when important events happened and how long people had been working on specific strategies. An issue I had with the combination was that the speed of the slideshow was too fast to read the text and fully appreciate the map. It seemed as if the speed had been designed for people looking at either just the map or reading just the text. I couldn't look back and forth with the automatic rate from the play button. Fortunately, The speed can be controlled manually, so I was able to work through the slideshow at my own pace.
The video has a graphic similar to the NYT graphic. The graphic showing the area of the spill is shown about a minute into the video. This graphic is animated more smoothly than the NYT graphic, and lets us see the progression of the oil spill in a way that we can easily recognized trends. This graphic does seem to be less accurate than the NYT graphic because the NYT graphic was not as smoothly and perfectly formed as the ABC one. The irregularity of nature probably would not have produced an oild spill as regular as the one displayed by ABC.
The ABC report focuses on the current issues rather than taking the timeline-like approach that the NYT takes. This is fine because it allows the video to focus on the specific problems like oil in the wetlands, which would be impossible if they tried to cover the events of the previous few weeks.
The video allows them to show the actual damage to the wetlands and wildlife. This part of the video creates powerful emotional argument. We can see the suffering and dead animals, so we are obviously eager to stop the oil from spreading. Unfortunately, as the video also tells us, there are not many options for stopping the spread, and it may take weeks or months until the flow is finally stopped.
A combination of the two graphics would have created the most effective graphic. With a combination we would have had an accurate graphic, but one that was easy to follow through time. The text from the NYT would have allowed us to easily place events in time and understand the complexity and size of the disaster. Both graphics do turn the event into one that can be compared to other disasters in a way that is impossible from other media sources.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
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