After they gather up all of this data they are going to give it out to anyone who is interested so that you can make your own visualizations of the stories. I’ve been thinking a lot about this project, and I’m really excited to tackle the visualization. I’m definitely exploring new territory in terms of my skills in GIS, and mapping visualizations but it’s been a great learning experience. I’ve got a few ideas brewing, more than a couple of which are way-crazy-out-of-my-league but hopefully by the end it can all be boiled down into something really interesting.

I’ve taken the liberty of cutting out an excerpt of the show where they talk about data visualization and This American Infographic, you can listen to the entire segment on Brian Lehrer’s website. ( http://beta.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2010/jun/21/data-visualization-project-intro )

Brian Lehrer Excerpt on Data Visualization on ejfox’s SoundCloud

In the story Ira Glass notes, “I was surprised to learn that when Poizner taught here in 2003 there was a golf course just a few blocks from the school – there’s still a lake and the Raging Waters water park. He doesn’t mention those in the book.” I was amazed by this. When I think of a rough-and-tumble inner-city school, I think of the schools from The Wire. I can’t imagine a golf course there. So I just looked it up on Google maps, and there really is a golf course a few blocks away. Not to mention the Raging Waters Water Park.

View Larger Map

Keep your eyes peeled, I’m digging into it.

Thank goodness I found some time to do some more infographics! This is one of the episodes that first inspired me to start making graphics based on each program. This episode shows what This American Life is best out- telling some really great stories while relating it to the big picture, as well as including some great statistics.

Woops! Sorry for the misplaced Penn State and University of Mississippi labels.

I’ve been working on all sorts of infographics all week. One piece I did for a client had to do with the U.S. unemployment rate, so I was naturally curious about how that would relate to holiday purchases. I’d heard that people were spending less, but I wondered how much it had to do with the unemployment rate. When charted out, there is a noticeable ebb and flow to the holiday sales increases.

I’ve been considering adding some of the newest episodes out of order, because these are some of my favorites. But on the other hand it is nice to keep things in order. Structure is nice.

Had a lot of fun working on this one. Isn’t it nice when an episode makes it easy to think of datapoints? I’m glad to have garnered some interest of some excellent designers, so look out for some other people’s work on here in weeks to come. Again, if you are interested in contributing, just send me an email and we can talk it over.

Today I was wondering about whether there is maybe a Processing sketch that I could feed the This American Life audio file and it would spit out a 900px waveform to add to the bottom of of these posts. I’m not too good with that kind of thing, but if you are & have suggestions, I’d love to hear from you in the comments or by email.

Thank you everyone who sends kind words about the project. I guess I’m going to actually do this thing, then. If you are a designer who would like to do a guest graphic for one of the upcoming episodes, just send me an email and we can talk it over. I’d love to see other people’s takes on the info.

Here’s the infographic for the third episode of This American Life. The first episode of what would become a tradition: the poultry slam.

I am having trouble expressing how awed and grateful I am to get a link from ThisAmericanLife.com – I never expected such a thing when I first posted a link to this project on my Twitter yesterday. As I navigated to ThisAmericanLife.com I noticed “Infographical Companions” on the homepage and thought that somebody had beat me to the idea!

If you have any suggestions as to how things should be done around here… angles I should look at, techniques I should use, or any other suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments. I am using this blog to learn and I welcome any and all criticism. I am doing my best to make something worthwhile for myself and others, so getting pointed in the right direction is helpful. Thank you for checking out my site, I hope that you’ll like it.

Today I listened to Episode 2. It’s funny how current this whole program sounds, everything seeming perfectly natural as “the recession” and it’s effects were mentioned. While listening to the segment on the hacker/phreaker/phishers I wondered about what kind of internet crimes are committed nowadays, so I found some data on that. I also found poet Michael Warr’s description of his schedule as a Jehovah’s Witness very interesting.

It was harder to create an infographic for this one than the first one. It was less about concrete concepts on which data can be dug up, and more about thinking philosophically about good and bad, which is certainly hard to quantify.

While doing the research I found this interesting summary of cybercrime cases (at justice.gov). The summaries are simple and eloquent and tell very interesting little stories. Such as Website designer redirected Aljazeera.net web traffic, FAA control tower disabled, and simply Member of hacking group “The Deceptive Duo”.