Inspire people with your stories

UNDP Administrator Helen Clark is the most active head of an international organization on Twitter, according to Twiplomacy. Here, she sums up her commitment to social media, telling stories about international development and sharing tales of success.
"Development is about about stories. it is about stories of achievement, of progress, of people's lives being better than they were," she says. "People want to hear about this. They don't want to hear about all the failures, they want to hear about what difference are you making.
Development is about a lot more than the money you invest in it. It is about inspiring people to take action themselves."

Simple data journalism tools

The Guardian's Datablog continues to serve as a beacon to data-focused journalists and others trying to use numbers to help tell stories.

This interview by O'Reilly's Strata blog includes reference to several of the key tools that the Datablog uses; some of them disarmingly simple: Excel, TextEdit, Google Fusion Tables, Google Spreadsheets,Timetric, Many Eyes, Adobe Illustrator, and Tableau.

Link

Best Free Tools To Make Infographics

Here is a great selection of tools for presenting data in visually compelling ways. 


As Fast Company notes, "it's not enough to simply write about data any longer; the world wants visuals."

A set recommended by Fast Company:

Many Eyes, by IBM;

Google Public Data Explorer;

Hohli for venn diagrams and scatter plots etc.;

Wordle, for word clouds; and

Visual.ly for not only creating, but also sharing infographics.

Link to post: The 5 Best Free Tools For Making Slick Infographics | Fast Company


Another great set of tools can be found here.

"Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools is a collection of tools that we... work with on a daily basis and recommend warmly... (and) will make your life easier, creating meaningful and beautiful data visualizations."

This list includes Web apps such as Stanford University's DataWrangler, for data cleaning and transformation, GeoCommons, a public community and set of tools to access, visualize and analyze data with maps, and Impure/Quadrigram, a visual programming language to gather, process and visualize information.

Read more about this collection at The Next Web. 


See also:

• 10 ways to report data better
• Infographic insights
• Infographics need stories
• Big data for development 

Journalism vs social media

The impact of social media on commercial journalism is often overestimated, and the audience size is still limited compared with mainstream news media. Yet the impact is real enough and likely to grow: job losses at CNN in 2011 were just one example, as the company makes greater use of public-sourced videos and photos in its iReports.

There is still a role for professional journalists, and for good reason. Most are trained, experienced and bound by professional principles and laws. They typically pride themselves for sifting the 'truth' or at least verifying facts before publishing. That includes not taking tweets at face value and seeking out balanced, expert opinions. Most journalists also know how to tell a good story, and some have a large personal following.

Of course not all journalists are up to this standard, and some bloggers have huge followings and some maintain very high standards of accuracy and balance. Hearing directly from a law maker or a scientist can be more powerful and detailed than traditional journalism allows.

Social media is now having a big impact in modern journalism, as this report by Paul Sawers of The Next Web attests. Based on discussions at the Social Media Week in London in February 2012, he quoted Paul Lewis, Special Projects Editor at the Guardian, on four key ways that social media is shaking things up:

1. Finding people (crowdsourcing information, witnesses or other key figures in a story);
2. Creating personalities from activists, bloggers and others who would otherwise not be given a voice;
3. Major events like the London riots e.g. following leads and chasing stories via Twitter, and keeping readers informed ahead of a formal publishing schedule;
4. Small actions making a big impact (the 'butterfly effect') e.g. a tweet containing very valuable information that sets off a big story.

There are many millions of people using Google+, Twitter, Facebook and other social media. Yet these channels do not fully represent public opinion. The tweets and posts will continue to represent special interests until social media is accessible to the urban poor, rural communities, the illiterate, the oppressed and people living and working in every country of the world. Until then, social media offers activists and other special interests the opportunity of a higher profile than they otherwise might get in a crowded media environment.

Social media is a growing communication channel, but there remains an important role for professional journalists to filter and validate that information.

Infographics need stories

Data is a story waiting to be told, and an infographic that brings data to life should start and end with the story. Keep the audience in mind and stay focused, and you should be on the right track.
Some quick tips in a blog here by Mark Johnstone. The linked blog by Ian Lurie is also of relevance, wherein Lurie discusses information vs knowledge.


Johnstone starts with the audience:
Who are they?
What can you say that is valuable to them?
Why should they be interested?
Would they want to hear more?

He also recommends that you try out your ideas for an infographic by discussing the concept with other people first. "Tell people about it next time you’re in the pub.  And watch their reaction.  Don’t listen, watch!  You’ll know in a second if it needs more work."

Lastly, he recommends you focusing on the audience more than the information you want to convey.

What do they want to know?
What do they need to know?
How could they benefit from thinking about things in a different way?
How can you help?
"In short, don’t think about what you have to say, but what you have to deliver!"


See also:
The 5 best free tools for making slick infographics
10 ways to report data better
Infographic insights

Big data for development

Communications can provide insights into poverty, so studying communications patterns can be helpful for designing development policies and programmes. That’s just one point emerging from a study at Harvard University’s Engineering Social Systems programme which is looking into ‘big data’, the new buzz word in academia, government, development and media circles.

And they are not alone. Academics from New York University and the University of New South Wales have published a series of ‘provocations’ to spark discussion about access to data and how it is used. “Will large-scale analysis of DNA help cure diseases? Or will it usher in a new wave of medical inequality?”


The United Nations has launched the project Global Pulse, which aims to evaluate masses of data in order to generate early warning signals about developmental challenges, ranging from crop failures to social discontent that can trigger civil conflict.

Big business is also hot on the trail. Mckinsey & Co. have published a paper on ‘the next frontier of data’. Of note, they don’t define big data by the size, since what is big today will be manageable before long: “big data refers to datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage and analyze”. With the benefits of exploiting such data predicted to exceed $300 billion to the US health sector annually, it is no wonder McKinsey is taking interest.

Ultimately it is all about you and me. Big data reflects the increasing capacity to track our every move, especially online. From spending patterns and vacation histories, to web browsing and more, the interests and habits of the greater public have never before been so well documented. It is opening a big opportunity for planners and policymakers, as well as marketers, strategists and also those who would exploit the information for less agreeable purposes – legal or otherwise. It is thus important and potentially very valuable that legislators and regulators both support open access to data for legitimate research, but also necessary to protect personal privacy, safeguard the integrity of data and set standards on its collection and the application of findings.

Further reading of interest: Bloomberg Business Week, on the dangers of insufficient information.

Publisher Tim O’Reilly on Google+ reports on a recent discussion of success factors, including the power of visualising  data. 

See also:

• 10 ways to report data better
• The 5 best free tools for making slick infographics
• Infographic insights
• Infographics need stories

10 ways to report data better

Turning numbers and trends into stories and knowledge can be challenging to journalists and scientists alike, but also fascinating for their audiences. A blog by Troy Thibodeaux, Associated Press journalist and blogger on the  Poynter University journalism website, provides a detailed and helpful list of tools to probe and present data.

The tools are divided into the following categories:
1. Spreadsheets, for basic presentation and analysis
2. SQL, for relational databases and more
3. Data cleaning tools, for removing impurities
4. Visualization tools, for the big picture
5. Mapping software, to see where you are
6. Scripting language, to help present this information
7. Web framework, for getting it online
8. Editing tools, to write code, and more
9. Revision control, to spot mistakes and save backups
10. Document analysis tools, to handle large document sets as data, provide an interface and overcome formats like PDFs.

See also:

• The 5 best free tools for making slick infographics
• Infographic insights
• Infographics need stories
• Big data for development

Infographic insights

A good infographic can convey a message faster than text, tables and conventional figures.

There are many styles to choose from and creative minds are searching for new ways to help tell complex stories more easily. Some efforts fall woefully short: simply bundling facts and figures together with artwork is not as effective as a well thought out figure or storyboard. Ideally, the graphic, poster or animation will contain the minimum information needed to convey its message, put things in perspective and perhaps even entertain and 'wow' the audience.

The Guardian, UK has blogged about this and uses infographics extensively in its award-winning datablog. I'm a fan of their contributor David McCandless of Information is Beautiful. He has helped pioneer this field despite - or perhaps because of - being self-taught.

Such is the popularity of infographics that some job applicants are even adopting them as the basis for job applications or CVs. Commentators continue to debate this approach, but Vizualize.me has even helped automate the process.

Here are some places to find interesting infographics. Suggest others in the comments below!

Visual.ly
Good.is infographics
Fast Company daily infographics
Daily Infographic 

Cool Infographics

See also:
The 5 best tools for making slick infographics
10 ways to report data better
Big data for development

Using video to communicate

Video can be a great tool to communicate some ideas, but please make sure it is well done!

Even a mobile telephone camera can take reasonable video (if it is equipped).
It is important to learn some basics: firstly, you must tell an interesting story (focus and scripting are needed); Know your subject and your audience, get the audio right (re-record it later if needed), and pay attention to things such as lighting (don't make it too dark) and a balance between long shots and close-ups, stills vs panning and zooming.

The following are two videos about the same concept (a cafe in India with a new outlook on 'business': visitors pay for the next person's meal, and receive their own for free, served by volunteers). The first is a far more appealing effort, while the second suffers from poor lighting and sound (though YouTube's very poor quality does neither any justice).

Video 1 (Seva Cafe, India):


Video 2 (Seva Cafe, India):


Lastly, I have added a different video here, about a project designed to enhance diaster preparedness among children living in tsunami-affected areas in Sri Lanka.
The style is very different - a series of still images and slides (words on screen), supported not with narration but with music. It is an interesting approach, though I would suggest (if the 'editor' has the tools) to put key words over top of the images and to pan and scan some images to give a sense of movement. Some video creation tools enable this, especially iMovie on the Apple Mac.

Video 3 (Disaster Preparedness, Sri Lanka):


See also:
How to advocate with video
How to film a revolution