After collecting all the data for One Week Of The Guardian, I’ve been looking through the statistics. One thing that struck me was the amount of words in the news for all 6 days, Monday to Saturday. In one week, there were 182,001 words. That sounds alot to me, but I managed to read all the papers and extract all the data in about 6 days (averaging 7–8 hours a day of actually working), but how does 182,000 compare to the average book?
From what I’ve foundout, the average book length is about 80,000 words, at 250 words to a page, that’s about 320 pages, or about 2.3x less than the amount of words in a weeks worth of the Guardian newspaper.
So for every week that passes, you can either read the newspaper everyday, or replace the newspaper for a book. Two books infact, lots of short stories, or one huge big novel. You’ll have to decide what’s more important; updated news, or some classic stories.
How long will it take me to read the average book?
I guess that just depends on how fast you read. Luckily, the internet being the internet, you can take a 60 second test to find out just that. Then take your average reading speed, divide it by the average number of words in a book (or if you have a specific book you want to find out, multiply the number of pages by 250 to find the average wordcount) then divide it by 60 to convert the total into hours, and that’s how long it takes for you to read a book (minus distractions, making a brew, looking up words you don’t understand, slaying vampires, etc., etc.).
Incase anyone’s interested, I seem to read at about 350 words per minute. (Although I’ve been reading Band Of Brothers for about 3 years… I’m savouring it!)
For an upcoming visual series on designing the news contained in the Guardian newspaper, I’ve been data mining through a weeks worth of the papers, Monday to Saturday (Sundays’ issue is the Observer so no Guardian then), and disecting all of the information. The information I took from the paper in order to create the visuals are available (in an OpenOffice spreadsheet) for anyone who may want to see it. Some of the information I take will change from day to day depending on the type of visual I am trying to create, but will all have a number of common statistics.
UKNEWS – 2706 / 541.2 / 11.73% / 98.65mm RAF and navy hardest hit by £4.5bn MoD cuts – 872 / p4
Miliband urged to regulate private military — 475 / p9
Brown hints at taking powers from Holyrood – 337 / p10
Sick veterans being let down, say MPs – 316 / p10
Brown and Cameron woo farmers’ union – 706 / p13
Having the data in a spreadsheet means I can filter out the information I need to create visuals with the information. Some of the information I’ve been looking at include the total amount of words in the category, the average article length by author, category, day etc, the percentage of the newspaper occupied, total amount of words, total no of pages, total amount of pages containing news, most popular stories, most popular categories, etc. etc. etc. Now that I have the info, it’s just about using it.
And now for the maths
This gets rather tedious after a while, but here’s an example of how I’ve been extracting the data for a couple of filters.
Story averages for each category = Total No. of words in the category / Total No. of stories
Total category percentages = (Total No. of words in the category / Total No. of words in all categories) * 100
Total amount of vertical space category should hold on an A1 poster = Height of A1 poster (841mm) * 0. Total category precentages)
Barebones data
Even without creating the visuals, just having all of the news printed in the Guardian for one week is pretty interesting to see. Already you can see the trends in the news, and how the paper ranks the news depending on the position it is printed, and the amount of words for the stories.
Last week The Media Centre in Huddersfield held a four day workshop to help develop our projects further for the final year. During the workshops were four presentations by various people from the design industry; Steve Teruggi of Winkreative and Monocle, David Squire of Desq, Christine Osborne of Swamp at Brahm, and Clive Tonge of Lynchpin.
After speaking with Steve and David and getting a review of my project, they both seemed to find the One Day of The Guardian piece pretty interesting. Although I rushed through the piece, and graphically I’m not a huge fan of it, it seemed to provoke some interesting discussion.
Since then, I’ve decided to create a ‘One Week of The Guardian’ which I’ve already started working on. This series will use various pieces of information I can pull from the paper, and display them in different ways on different days.
For this series, I will index all of the news from the paper, and remove all of the other elements of the paper that are not. i.e. Adverts, articles with no cited author, comics, consumer reviews, horoscopes, promotions, puzzles, prize give-aways, reader responses and letters to the paper, stock index charts, and weather reports.
In the previous version, I included the obituaries. However, in this version I have omitted the obits as I decided that someone dying of natural causes or disease isn’t really news, but if a person dies in suspicious circumstances then it would be included in other sections of the paper under subject headings that are indexed in the piece.
I will be categorising the news according to where it is posted in the Guardian newspaper and on the Guardian website, but only using one depth of categorisation, the most relevant one.
Yet another headline from The Guardian newspaper. Incase you’re not picking up on this, there’s a pattern forming here. I read The Guardian. I’m saving reading The Sun, or the News Of The World for a later date, partly because I’m saving the over exaggerated fantasies for a more befitting scenario, and partly because I’m still trying to decide if what they print is actually news.
“Upbeat Leigh film wows Berlin festival” — Frontpage headline teaser — The Guardian
UPDATE: Have re-tweaked the image to further degrade the appearance of the boat.
Another headline from The Guardian, this time it’s a front page story. With ships. Carrying booty. On the sea. And maybe pirates? I hope there’s pirates. Arrrr.
“True scale of C0₂emissions from shipping revealed” — The Guardian
The owl and the pussycat went to sea, in a rather large and environmentally harmful cargo ship.
Image analysis
The image was badly sketched, imported into Illustrator and redrawn to be a clear and simple graphic with minimal detailing. The type was positioned inside the smoke plume, and then distorted inside of Illustrator to make it appear more fluid. The graphic was imported into Photoshop, and dusted with a little magic to finish it off.
I really should stress this is in no way a tutorial, and for those who are looking for the magic button in Photoshop, it’s under Filter/Render/Magic/Dusting.
I did want to point out a couple of things, one of them being the dirty water left behind by the ships, another being the really cool typography, just incase you missed it.
From reading the paper the other day, I sketched out a few drawings of headlines to work with. I haven’t really been very good with sketching anything accurately, but I figured I’ll give it a go and clean it up in Photoshop. Anyways, I suck at drawing.
“Inspired by talent shows, Brown gets the X Factor” — The Guardian
Illustrated headlines are pretty! I tried to amplify the imperfections and distortions in his portrait to give a little more character.
After just completing a static news visualisation, I realised the way I linked the stories and authors together was in a serial fashion. That is to say, I linked the stories along a path that progressed from one story to the next in order of the position they appeared in the paper, but they could of been linked in other ways.
I want to see in which situations certain linking conventions would be best, so I’ve decided to do a little relation research and theory.
Serial linking
Linking a series of items that connect to one another via the next in line, i.e. 1 links to 2, 2 links to 3, but 1 can’t link to 3 directly, it has to go through 2.
For what I’ve been working on recently, minus the poster I just created, I think the use of serial linking would be best used on things that are constant, for example ‘time and date’. Using this method would offer a simpler way of relating items to one another, but may offer a more conscise set of relations.
Parallel linking
Linking items together by direct contact with each other, i.e. 1 links to everything it wants to, 2 links to everything it wants to, etc. etc.
Using parallel linkage would offer a wider set of relations, as one story would link out to infinite number of other related items directly without going through a neighbour. However with the wider set of relations, all may not be as closely related to one another as with the serial linking.
Recently I’ve been working on some static visualisations of news, and decided to create a poster with all of the news printed in the Guardian newspaper for one day. I played about with a couple of versions, trying to create relationships between the stories and the authors.
The visual is based on serial relationships between elements, but more on serial and parallel relations later.
Colour coded articles put the stories into categories.
The pipes connect the categories to one another in serial relationships.
Overlayed some quick and dirty scribbles to relate the stories to the authors.
…And a quick tally of stories by category and total.
There’s a fair bit to learn just from looking at this. For example, how the paper starts off by having varying subject categories before progressing into special dedicated sections with concentrated subject areas, seeing what were the most popular story categories, or which authors have the most published articles for that day.
After a presentation I gave last month as part of a first term review, I have decided to refocus the main project aims and outcomes. When I decided to take on this project my aims were to create and develop a broad range of experiments which encourage viewing the news in different, more visual ways. Although I would like as much as possible to be able to do this, being a ‘jack of all trades and master of none’ is not what I’m going for.
Therefore, I have now set new project goals to concentrate on, whilst still keeping the theme of making the news more visual.
The refocused project aims will now be:
Simplification — To explore various ways of simplifying the presentation of existing news, and news data.
Visualisation — To transform a primarily text based medium into a more visual presentation of information.
Relationships — To create relationships between news reports to create a complete view of a series of events.
The presentation slides are available as a PDF if anyone wants. There’s not really much explanation in the slides but I think you can kind of see my train of thought.
Well I’m getting ready to disect a few pages of statistics and start creating a bunch of pictograms and infographics, and I did what’s probably going to be the last lot of research on the subject.
Destructive spending by liquisoft, via DeviantArt.
Our goal was to design a poster that informed the public of something. Our focus, for this project, was to do something related to government missile spending and how it effects us taxpayers.
The 42 Below Vodka campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi NY uses pictograms to various stories involving vodka. It took the gold award in the Clio Awards 2008.
An interactive infographic from the New York Times on how to drain the excess water brought in by hurricane Katrina.
A PDF infographic of what happened when hurricane Katrina hit.
The webtrends map takes the subway map approach to map out popular online applications.
Bioshock as some really great infographics on their plasmid instruction videos, along with some rather excellent old school drawing styles.
Looking around ‘teh interwebs’ for more infographic examples, I was extremely impressed by the quality and range in the portfolio of 10create.
USA Today loves it’s interactive infographics, and here’s another example.
A beautiful timeline from the BBC explaining British history using interactive infographics.
Explore all of British history, from the Neolithic to the present day, with this easy-to-use interactive timeline. Browse hundreds of key events and discover how the past has shaped the world we live in today.
Since we’re on coffee here, I highly reccomend Douwe Egberts Continental, dark or gold, both are delicious! For me it’s the best coffee in the world, beating that of the coffee shops!
These have to be my favourite infographics. Simple, solid, and they’re about something I love! I also have a copy of these I printed out and pinned on my wall.
An excellent infographic which takes the data you input, and maps out an estimated cost/savings plan on whether or not you should buy or rent.
Edward Tufte shows his appreciation for the work of Megan Jaegerman on his website where he breaks down and analyses some of the infographics.
Businessweek maps out user interactivity online using large size coloured pixels.
More animated infographics
Did you know 2.0 uses simple graphics, tells the story of our current situation.
This video shows us an interview with a police sheriff talking about the infographics printed in an American newspaper regarding inaccuracies in the story about a shooting.
Dirt Party Research video shows some pretty good infographics mashup with some 80s cheese thrown in for good measure!
In the film ‘Stranger Than Fiction’ Will Ferrall’s character thinks alot about the mundane, and in the film this is illustrated by some really nice infographics. I couldn’t find a clip of the opening titles (which is full of infographics) but I did find this music video which someone has put together.
Finally we come to Royksopp, and their video for Remind Me. Beautiful, and a pretty good song too.
That’s it for now I guess. If anyone has any input or they know of any infographics examples that should be on this list let me know. Otherwise I have a presentation to prepare for on Thursday now so I don’t think I’ll be posting any more until Friday. That, plus an impending dissertation deadline means I have a busy christmas ahead.
