{"id":2382,"date":"2012-10-07T12:41:48","date_gmt":"2012-10-07T17:41:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/?p=2382"},"modified":"2012-10-07T12:41:48","modified_gmt":"2012-10-07T17:41:48","slug":"crowdsourced-usage-help-and-observations-for-data-visualizations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/2012\/10\/07\/crowdsourced-usage-help-and-observations-for-data-visualizations\/","title":{"rendered":"Crowdsourced usage help and observations for data visualizations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is my pitch for the <a title=\"Media Ideation Fellowship\" href=\"http:\/\/mediaideation.org\">Media Ideation Fellowship<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h3>Project Description<\/h3>\n<p>This project would provide a platform for user-contributed usage instructions (&#8220;move the slider to the right to see the data for different years&#8221; or observations (&#8220;wow, DC has so many charter schools&#8221;) for web and print-based data visualizations. The project would help make data visualizations and their insights more accessible and provide a body of feedback for developers and journalists to create more usable visualizations. Through a public API for web applications and QR codes and short URLs for print, journalists and developers can integrate the platform into their visualizations.<\/p>\n<h3>What problem or issue are you trying to address with this project?<\/h3>\n<p>We live in a culture which increasingly fetishizes policy decisions that are \u201cdata-driven\u201d.\u00a0 From the future of publicly-funded education in Chicago to the disconnection of residents from city infrastructure in Detroit, data fills a prominent role in the discourse around issues that profoundly impact our lives. Certainly, data has always driven decision-making by policy makers and evaluation of proposals by the public, and it&#8217;s an important part of civic process. The danger is for data to take on a magical quality instead of being framed as a tool that can be used, and abused, in the service of civic problem solving. If publics are to leverage data, we must be empowered consumers of this information.<\/p>\n<h3>Background<\/h3>\n<p>While researching information about the Chicago teachers strike, I came upon this data visualization about the growth in charter schools, I came upon this visualization:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/project.wnyc.org\/30iss-charter\/embed.html\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" width=\"100%\" height=\"840\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>While a careful reading of the instructions could have told me that this was a map of the US and that moving the slider shows the change in the number of charter schools over time, I just wanted to dive in and was confused. Having more human instructions that say &#8220;Hey, this is a map of the US&#8221; or &#8220;move the slider&#8221; and observations like &#8220;look how charter schools grew in D.C.\u00a0 That documentary Waiting for Superman talked a lot about that&#8221; seemed like something that should exist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is my pitch for the Media Ideation Fellowship. Project Description This project would provide a platform for user-contributed usage instructions (&#8220;move the slider to the right to see the data for different years&#8221; or observations (&#8220;wow, DC has so many charter schools&#8221;) for web and print-based data visualizations. The project would help make data&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/2012\/10\/07\/crowdsourced-usage-help-and-observations-for-data-visualizations\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Crowdsourced usage help and observations for data visualizations<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[628],"tags":[20646,20645,21296,30,204],"class_list":["post-2382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas","tag-crowdsource","tag-data","tag-journalism","tag-media","tag-visualization","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wnIz-Cq","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2382"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2383,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2382\/revisions\/2383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}