The Design of Information

I came across this visually arresting depiction of gun murders today, thanks to a tip from my friend, Kimball. It was created by the folks at Periscopic, whose mission is to “do good with data”. The animation packs a punch, and when it’s finished, you have a number of options for diving into the data, including getting a sense of the individuals affected.

The arcs in the graphic show how long the murdered person might have lived, trying to give a sense of “stolen years”. I was a bit skeptical when I saw some of the lines showing a life expectancy in the 90s, but reading the notes on methods and sources, I see that each individual line is based on a the age distribution of deaths (not the average life expectancy). Meaning that there would logically be a few people that would make it into their 90s (and some that would die at 50).

I know this is a topic on a lot of minds right now. Not sure where I come down on gun control, but I do find that this exploration raises a lot of questions in my mind. Like a good data visualization should.

In an interesting coincidence, the original dataset was researched by Jerome Cukier, who is helping me with a project right now.

This week, my sister tipped me off about The Atavist, a new take on multi-layered storytelling via iPhone or iPad apps (also available on Kindle and Nook). Threestory Studio got its name in part because of my interest in telling stories visually, so I was intrigued to see what The Atavist had to offer.

One of the first things I discovered was a rich infographic showing the events leading up to the fall of the regime in Egypt. It combines a timeline of events with web traffic data and social media engagement in Egypt.

It wasn’t immediately clear what the black bars rising from the bottom were – they appear to indicate numbers of people involved in protests or revolutionary activities. Otherwise, this graphic receives high marks.

The full graphic can be downloaded here. It was created by Erik Steiner of the Spatial History Project at Stanford University.

The promised infographic résumé tool that I mentioned a few posts back has launched at Vizualize.me. It’s a customizable infographic interpretation of your LinkedIn profile, to which you can add skills and other experience. Using LinkedIn to populate the infographic gives a jumpstart to the process. Seeing work experience in a timeline makes a lot of sense, though the scale of the education timeline differs from work experience in a way that gives a distorted view. See my full infographic CV:

Looks like you may soon be able to create a visual version of your resume in “one click” with the help of vizualize.me. Resumes are certainly fertile ground for visual rethinking, and what job applicant doesn’t want their resume to stand out from the pack?

Looks like Fast Company got access to a beta version of the software — you can see a version Ashton Kutcher’s resume on their site.

We’ll see how much customizing is possible once they launch. With the diversity of individual experiences and the differences among job opportunities, it seems like customized options are a must — I know I wouldn’t send the same resume to two different potential employers. If this catches on, it may make it easier for employers to compare resumes, but that would lead us back to people wanting to differentiate. Maybe that’s where visualize.me starts up-charging for higher levels of customization. Sounds a little like Sylvester McMonkey McBean and the racket he pulled off on the Sneetches. Are there stars upon yars?