I'm doing a presentation on "The Political Power of Data Visualization" and I would like to highlight some of the more notable/influential uses of data visualizations towards some political goal.
Here are a few of the examples I've got so far...what others am I missing?
Ross Perot's deficit charts during his presidential campaign's infomercial .
Al Gore's dataviz in "An Inconvenient Truth"
Hans Rosling's Gapminder presentations.
What else can you think of?
i don't think this is what you're looking for, but here's an example of misuse in politics:
http://flowingdata.com/2009/07/20/important-data-please-act-responsibily/
Actually, misleading ones are also good examples...thrust of the talk actually will be how to be a discerning consumer of political viz. So this is good - thanks Nathan.
Hi Alex,
This is probably a little off target, but we recently launched Congress Speaks which is a light-hearted look at the words spoken by the 110th congress.
http://www.congressspeaks.com/
Also, you may want to check out the Sunlight Foundation. I believe there should be some good info for you there:
http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/
Best of luck!
Thanks @krees. I've really enjoyed congressspeaks - great job on that! Sunlight's also a great resource.
At some point there should be video of the presentation available (giving it Oct 8) so I'll be sure to post it to the forum.
cool, looking forward to it
hi, there's our youth insight project, Voicebox (www.vinspired.com/voicebox). We aggregate young people's views / behaviour on stuff like knife crime, underage sex, and political beliefs and visualise the results. You can filter all the data, so see if people of different ages, gender, ethnicity. And there's a data API.
The political point is about representing the reality of youth to government - rather than stereotypes. We're doing a report by the famous UK think-tank, Demos, who will summarise the findings and turn it into policy.
Also, our latest Voicebox theme, uses a 'physical data visualisation'. We want to create a portrait of what young people care about, so they submit their 'cares' to us and a robot - the Voicebot - writes them out in real time, in the real world, with a pen, inside the Houses of Parliament for MPs to read! This project is live now. You can see the livestream http://www.vinspired.com/voicebox.
We were interested in not just collecting data but doing stuff with it as well i.e. sharing it with the people who make decisions, actually in the corridors of power. Using the Voicebot, "data" becomes something that we collect and then distribute in an environment where it can be used.
Here are some links:
the flickr pool with all the awesome messages uploaded http://bit.ly/13jTc0
a physical visualisation in the shape of an exhibition in Parliament http://bit.ly/17VLUK
a tag wheel pulling out the top 20 keywords as a web visualisation http://voicebox.vinspired.com/results/
hope you like
You may like the map of the US political web: http://politicosphere.net/
(see other viz in their blog at http://us.linkfluence.net/blog/)
And video of the presentation is finally up! Chart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization...you can view it here: http://www.blip.tv/file/3002176/
Thanks to all for the helpful input!
- Alex
@alex - i caught the talk on infosthetics earlier this morning. nicely done.
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