There was a time, not so long ago, when a blog or news site’s comments section was considered a boon to Internet dialogue – a way for the “people formerly known as the audience” to break past the media gatekeepers and create meaningful discussion on an issue or topic. Comments were a new evolution of the traditional letters to the editor appearing in newspapers for more than a century. No single arbiter of taste would decide which letters appeared in the paper and which were thrown to the waste bin.Continue Reading

Name any of the most highly regarded data visualizations offered in the last half decade and there’s no doubt the most stunning examples involved intricate design and elaborate storytelling.

Take The New Yorker’s wonderful Inequality and New York’s Subway interactive graphic as an example:Continue Reading

This summer, a video, The Fallen of World War II, was uploaded to Vimeo and gained attention across the Internet. Written, directed, coded, and narrated by a data-visualization specialist named Neil Halloran, the video spends 18 jaw-dropping minutes narrating the history of World War II through the prism of how many people died. Using a single stick figure to represent a thousand deaths, Halloran methodically walks us through the carnage, stacking up both civilian and military casualties in such a way that quantifies the horror of history’s deadliest war. In doing so, Halloran imparted knowledge and information in a way no history textbook ever could. In terms of data visualization, I can think of few examples that can compare to Halloran’s video in both scope and breadth.Continue Reading