mymChallenge.jpg

The Map Your Moves Chal­lenge fas­cin­ates me. New York’s Pub­lic Radio sta­tion WNYC has devised a data visu­al­isa­tion chal­lenge for their listen­ers. Curi­ous about what makes people move from and to their com­munity they polled stor­ies from their listen­ers and col­lec­ted them into a struc­tured data­set and have released it into the wild. Now this is very cool…they want to take real stor­ies and under­stand how these stor­ies inter­act and how they can learn about their own com­munity from them. Abso­lutely brilliant!

You can listen to the ini­tial announce­ment of the pro­ject on their stream­ing player. OK..“Valerie, let’s talk a little about data visu­al­isa­tion…” I am very impressed. Telling a story in a dif­fer­ent way is very excit­ing. I would admit that there is some con­fla­tion between data vis and infograph­ics, but I am very, very impressed by the fact that this is com­ing from a real life curi­os­ity to answer real ques­tions. This is def­in­itely the best advert for ‘doing’ data visu­al­isa­tion that I have found. Inter­est­ingly as well, they seem to have an evolving sur­vey form that adapts to the inform­a­tion people.

They have realesed the data­set into the wild at via drop.io and have opened it up to any­one to play with the data and to find new ways to present the stor­ies that it rep­res­ents. They even have an ‘offi­cial’ Census Pro­ject Editor. Wow! What I find very cool is the won­der­fully engaged way in which this pub­lic radio sta­tion is ask­ing ques­tions about how their com­munity is evolving. I have been very impressed by the interest of the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion of Ire­land whenever the National Archives releases another tranche of census info. The news­pa­pers cover this as a major event and it becomes the fod­der for dis­cus­sion in the pub and over the din­ner table. I was very sur­prised (but maybe I shouldn’t be) that there was this sim­ilar engage­ment glob­ally. The census pro­ject site on the wnyc web­site touts that:

Every 10 years the coun­try “counts heads” and uses those num­bers to determ­ine everything from elec­tion dis­tricts to fund­ing levels. But the story of our neigh­bor­hoods, cit­ies, and states is much deeper than what’s in the num­bers. Join the Brian Lehrer Show as we make sure our listen­ers count, from in-depth cov­er­age of the census pro­cess to inter­act­ive pro­jects and all sorts of stor­ies about who we are and how we live in 2010.

They are inter­rog­at­ing the statistics…counting the numbers…because they rep­res­ent indi­vidu­als and they are using tech­no­logy to reach down and find the stor­ies behind the num­bers. I find this amaz­ingly grat­i­fy­ing and have down­loaded the great data­set they provided to try my own naive hand at find­ing some inter­est­ing ways to see the stor­ies through the user con­trib­uted information.

There is an ironic tim­ing to this dis­cus­sion. Here I am being so very impressed at a com­munity want­ing to under­stand itself through the shar­ing of stor­ies, when the Steven Harper gov­ern­ment in Canada have decided that census should really be a vol­un­tary sort of thing (kind of defeat­ing the pur­pose eh?) and that the state has for too long being inter­ested in the con­stitu­ent mem­bers of the national com­munity. They have, with the claimed agree­ment of Stat­ist­ics Canada, decided to dis­con­tinue the use of the long form which was dis­trib­uted to 20% of the Cana­dian pop­u­la­tion and sought to under­stand the demo­graphy and live­li­hood of the com­munity. Although it was aggreg­ated and kept anonym­ous (Stats Can has an unblem­ished record and zeal­ously pro­tects the pri­vacy of Cana­dians), this seems to have had little bear­ing on the decision. The con­tro­versy has now res­ul­ted in the resig­na­tion of the Head of Stat­ist­ics Canada, Munir Sheikh over the issue. National news­pa­pers have sug­ges­ted that the national animal be changed from the beaver to the ostrich and that “Opt­ing to know less about ourselves is about as smart as fly­ing without instru­ments” quips James Tra­vers in the Toronto Star. Per­haps the decision is simply telling about the nature of decision-maming in the the Cana­dian gov­ern­ment. Ontario has rep­res­en­ted its deep dis­agree­ment with the decision and more import­antly reminded the fed­eral gov­ern­ment that it does in fact base crtit­ical wel­fare, health and pub­lic ser­vice decisions it makes from know­ing about the people it serves — and the cru­cial data provided by Stat­ist­ics Canada. A rather telling com­ment on the Cana­dian polit­ical sys­tem. Let’s watch and see how this one plays out. In the mean­time, I applaud com­munit­ies want­ing to know more about them­selves as a means of improv­ing the lives of those that call a place home.