Letting a Picture Tell the Story

A picture is worth a thousand words -- but did you know it could also represent one thousand pieces of content?

Two years ago I wrote about Financial Time's (shortlived) Newssift, a business site that strove to create a business model around a new type of search -- with metadata exposed. With a naive go-to-market plan and too many months (and dollars spent) in R&D, the patience of the parent company were taxed, and Newssift was shuttered mere months after it was launched.

As a business Newssift failed. But the concept to use the metadata to attract and engage readers -- even if the graphics were simple pie charts -- was a bold move. Today news organizations like the Washington Post, The New York Times & PBS are using vast troves of content to drive sophisticated visualization tools as a means of telling a more complex story -- in an engaging way.

In some cases they are tapping their own archives on a given subject, in others, they are tapping the crowds. In this NYT interactive that appeared on May 3, 2011, readers were asked to weigh the significance and emotional response to the news of Osama Bin Laden's death. Each comments was semantically analyzed by sentiment, and that metadata were plotted in the multi-dimensional graph. Each blue dot represents a comment, which can be clicked on and viewed. The Times tapped the audience to create a visual that sums up the visceral feelings of its readers. 

Patrick Sullivan, veteran UX guru, founder and CEO of Modus, a digital agency that helps organizations like PBS and Bloomberg create exciting digital and mobile applications and interfaces, finds this type of visualization tool a terrific way to engage and extend the long form story. "Look at the corners of the map -- where strong polarization of feelings reside," he explained. "Of course, overwhelmingly, there is a universal feeling of satisfaction and that this was a significant event."

All three variables of information were captured and related in this graph. As you mouse over the points, a portion of the comment appears.

So how do news organizations, government agencies, museums -- anyone with large amounts of content --  do it? It's simple really: by exposing the metadata -- which plays right into the strength of the MarkLogic server. Sullivan will be joining me and MarkLogic's Principal Technologist Matt Turner on Wednesday, May 18 webcast at 11am to talk about these visualization techniques -- and what organizations need to do in order to have the content in ready-form to drive these terrific engagement tools. Sullivan assures me that this graphic depiction can work on mobile devices too!