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.