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There’s this church downtown, near wear my wife works, with maybe 30 small signs that read “peace starts with ME” and behind those are this larger sign that shows the number of days since buffalo’s last homicide (7). To say the least, it was a bit unsettling that my wife had to work there (especially since she has to work late at night).

anyways, my point being, that buffalo even has a program called citistat, which began in 2005; however, they offer very little data. I think I’ll start bugging them as well.

I enjoyed the screencast, btw :)

In the case of your show and tell, there were many charts being shown about a part of the US i know little or nothing about, and i could not easily pause to go back slowly to assess if your statements made sense with the data shown on the screen. It was also hard to follow along and i could not go back to review any texts associated with what you were saying and showing nor were there any metadata nor methodological statements i could read. You also went through tons of geography that i have no reference to in my mental map. You did tell a good story, and it was good to hear it and see it, an excellent experiment, but i think there is more to data representation than good narrative and there is no one magic bullet but a number of factors that make the data speak.

I look forward to more experiments.

See Tufte (http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/) – especially his space shuttle booklet. He does not deal with sound but does deal with data representation and visualization quite well and has some excellent examples.

Absolutely! I still think Many Eyes, for example, is missing a trick with the *access* part. You can’t get any more accessible than an HTML table at a public URL, using standard elements for headers, footers, rows, columns, cells, a caption, etc. But Many Eyes hides the data as a partial “preview” at a randomised URI in a table with no id.

You need that URI fragment to do proper *incorporation* – transformation, visualization, filters, pivots, etc. You shouldn’t have to upload any data, you should just provide the URIs, and a set of mashup services can get going!

As for *discourse* – explaining, annotating, and discussing the data collaboratively – this is another area where HTML beats spreadsheets hands down – they can’t even layout text properly!

See my blog post for an idea of how this should all work – whenever you add a table to your blog, spreadsheet-like functionality should be available within the blog editor.

Agreed. I am really hoping to encourage the idea that regular folks can not only access data, but incorporate it into their routine civic discourse.

And I am particularly looking for ways in which that civic discourse can be grounded in data, in a way that’s much more fluid.

Many Eyes is moving in the direction of more annotation tools, and I’ll bet in time it (and similar kinds of social analysis services) will become platforms for doing presentations.

It’s interesting because I recently saw the founders give presentations based on some of the stuff in Many Eyes, and of course their tour through the data made it come alive in away that it doesn’t when you simply visit the site. Of course that excitement then translates into making you want to visit the site and engage with the data, so it’s a virtuous circle.

Clearly, the big win in your scenario comes from the social analysis provided by Many Eyes. That way, viewers — possibly those worried citizens in Keene — can perform their own analysis as well.