A Data Journalism Meetup in Berlin

Sarah and I are currently working in Berlin, at least until early September, and as luck would have it, the Web of Data Meetup group held their third meet up group here, in Fjord's rather lovely German HQ, right by Checkpoint Charlie, as it happens (making this our only venture into the former West Berlin on the trip so far, if only by metres).

Not having acquainted ourselves with the full schedule, we'd anticipated perhaps two or three presentations and a bit of informal networking. Not a bit of it. Rather, the seven-hour-plus afternoon and evening session was tightly run, intelligently programmed and both enlightening and engaging. While being detailed enough to be meaningful it somehow remained sufficiently service-/strategy-/product-focussed to by graspable by the non-engineers in the room – about half of us it turned out.

Billed Data Journalism, the workshop looked at a range of issues which arise from the uses (and possible misuses) of data and metadata in contemporary journalism – in its print, broadcast and online guises – and asked what fundamental changes are affecting the industry as a result.

Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation set the scene at the afternoon's opening, making clear the degree to which government and business the world over was opening up its records, and pointing to the vast opportunities this opens for journalists and campaigners.

Tom Scott from the BBC talked about the thinking behind and build process behind the fabulous BBC Wildlife Finder, and how it used broadcast metadata to aggregate video clips around various genres of biology, from animal type to ecozone. He pointed out something which emerged over and over during the afternoon – that smart use of data and tagging allowed the dynamic creation and aggregation of content which, done "by hand" would be financially and logistically untenable. He had one of the great lines of the afternoon, too: "People care about things, not web pages." Quite.

Deutsche Presse Agentur's Gerd Kamp then took us more directly into the world of journalism, discussing DPA's use of data in everything from scoping stories regionally (hugely important when syndicating stories to local news outlets) to creating dynamically-generated infographics and maps. Gerd made the astute observation that many of the CMSs used by journalists already included metadata tagging functionality but that too few journalists were incentivised to use them.

More from the BBC: Silver Oliver and Jem Rayfield from BBC News talked about the broadcaster's online coverage of the World Cup, taking us through, respectively, the IA and data approaches necessary to disaggregate content from its usual "linear" context and instead present it around rather meaningful, dynamically-created pages (over 800 of them, by the end of the tournament.)

The Guardian's information architect Martin Belam gave a funny and thought-provoking overview of the online newspaper's use of data in the creation of stories and campaigns, looking in some detail at the way The Guardian has been able to use crowd-sourcing collaborations with its readers to sift through otherwise unwieldy – and hence pretty much useless – data sets. Martin has blogged about the day, too.

Political scientist Ole Wintermann of The Bertelsmann Foundation's Future Challenges sounded a slightly cautionary note among the enthusiasm. It's all well and good the media – and hence both the public and civil society in general – having access to unprecedented amounts of data, but inferring causal meaning from data, be it about, climate or demographics, remained a huge challenge. In a moment somewhat reminiscent of Neville Brodie's recent appearance on Newsnight, he was especially scathing about the reliance of journalists and policy makers on infographics to communicate ideas without really examining substance – especially substance in terms of causality. Sarah and I both felt it was one of the most adroit interventions of the afternoon (and I'll have more to say on the matter in post in the near future).

The presentations ended with the University of Btitish Columbia's Eric Ulken talking about his former employer, the LA Times' use of data. Not passing up a golden opportunity to foment a slightly stroppy discussion he talked us through, let's say, somewhat controversial use of data by the paper: its publication of teacher performances in the city. It certainly raised the room's temperature, and rightly so. Responsibility and caution need to applied in data journalism as much as in the venerable profession's other guises – and arguably more so.

So a thoroughly enjoyable, stimulating and, yes, rather tiring day. Our thanks to Georgi Kobilarov of linked data specialists Uberblic Labs for organising it all.

A whole new meaning to "death by Powerpoint"

This image has quickly become the most famous Powerpoint slide in the world. It's designed to demonstrate the nuances of the US/Nato intervention in Afghanistan and the complex context around it. After it had done the rounds on the web for a few days, The New York Times recently ran an article analysing the way in which Powerpoint has taken over the internal communications of the US army, featuring this as the lead picture. It's since cropped up in at least one UK newspaper. Justin spotted the article, Simon had some penetrating insights about it, and I have time to write it all up, so here goes. 

The article makes some highly valid points about the way that Powerpoint "can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control", and the fetishising of the simple that pervades so much of management culture, not just in the military. It also points to a heartening backlash.

But there's an irony at the heart of the story: this diagram is a totally inappropriate representative of the dumbness and over-simplification of corporate communications. As someone whose knowledge of the situation in Afghanistan is as superficial as the next man's, I can't make any claims for the usefulness of the diagram in representing reality. But it does at the very least demonstrate an honest intent to visualise a difficult situation in a way that does justice to its complexity. It also points to some flaws in the paradigm of presentation that we've all come to know and usually detest.

It seems this image was indeed used as a slide in a Powerpoint presentation. I expect that was done in order to make a meta-level point about the complexity of the situation, rather than inviting anyone actually to take it in and understand it. That's a pretty cheap sideshow trick that I've been guilty of myself. But what if someone decided to take it seriously and make it the object of the presentation?

We in Unthinkable are passionately interested in the different ways information can be visualised and schematised, and firmly believe that visual models can go places where text alone can't in terms of helping us think and understand. We use Mindmeister for shared mind maps, and diagrams and graphical representations are important parts of our service offering for our clients.

On which point we stumbled across a couple of interesting developments recently in the representation of information. One is Google labs' launch of the "public data explorer". In 2007 Google bought Gapminder's underlying technology, Trendalyzer, from Gapminder, and they have now launched a service that produces Gapminder-esque visualisations based on public data from European, US and international sources (the World Bank features heavily). This is visualisation applied at a meta level across the public datasets that are becoming increasingly available (and which we blogged about recently).

At the other end of the manual-automatic spectrum, we have discovered a tool (thanks to a tip-off from our friend Charles Day) that enables a thoroughly authored approach to representing information and telling stories. Prezi is an online presentation tool which abandons the concept of the slideshow in favour of what looks like an animated mind-map on speed, but which also generates some very useful visualisations. Prezi's creators have some interesting points to make about the way in which the Powerpoint paradigm is based on the out-of-date technology of the slide show, and question whether this should continue to dictate the way we should think about information. How far the work that people have done so far with the tool actually transcends that essentially linear paradigm is debatable, but we applaud the intention and recognise the potential of Prezi and tools like it to revolutionise our communications.

The key point here is the possibility of an approach to presenting which need not sacrifice complexity for the sake of clarity - and perhaps the key to that is a move away from the need for a linear structure that has characterised so much of the culture around presenting.

Which brings us back to the supposedly risible image at the top of this post. If presented as a mind map with zoom functionality in the less linear format that tools like Prezi make possible, one can imagine a wholly different presentation and discussion taking place. And who knows? The impact these kinds of changes of approach could have might truly be a life-or-death issue.