I love where Chris McDowall is going with his animation and visualisation work and look forward to seeing more from him.

He’s published on Sciblogs an animated map of Auckland’s buses and ferries over a single day.

An animated map of Auckland’s public transport network from Chris McDowall on Vimeo.

The animation begins at 3am on a typical Monday morning. A pair of blue squiggles depict the Airport buses shuttling late night travellers between the Downtown Ferry Terminal and Auckland International. From 5am, a skeleton service of local buses begins making trips from the outer suburbs to the inner city and the first ferry departs for Waiheke Island. Over the next few hours the volume and frequency of vehicles steadily increases until we reach peak morning rush hour. By 8am the city’s major transportation corridors are clearly delineated by a stream of buses filled with commuters. After 9am the volume of vehicles drops a little and stays steady until the schools get out and the evening commute begins. The animation ends at midnight with just a few night buses moving passengers away from the central city.

Some things to note:
The steady pulse of the Devonport Ferry.
The speed at which buses hurtle down the Northern Motorway’s new bus lanes.
The interplay between buses and ferries on Waiheke Island.
The sheer mind-boggling complexity of the system.

Chris describes the process (and a few limitations he found with it) over on his blog at sciblogs.co.nz. Worth a look.

5′ video from the Guardian about how its journalists are handling Wikileaks cables and editing them for publication.

(If video is not displaying, you can see it here)

I enjoyed this post from Lauren Rabaino on 10,000 Words about the use of kinetic type in video storytelling and how it can be used in journalism.

There’s huge value in being able to tell a story that people will read all the way through– from start to finish– and then share with all their friends and family. Kinetic type lends itself to exactly that kind of attentiveness and shareability.

I’m not alone in watching those videos all the way through, every time. We’re of a visual era. We like seeing content in a way that engages us, a way that attracts our full attention. These videos are addicting — but not just because they’re fun. You walk away from them with a new wealth of knowledge that is easily digestible and thus easily retainable.

She provides a few examples including the well-known Did You Know videos and this one from Good magazine about the cost of war to the US.

As an aside, while I was checking into the numbers used in the video I came across costofwar.com, a running (and rather sobering) counter of the cost of the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan (based on funds allocated by Congress).

Lauren finishes her post with a how-to list. Here are the first three suggestions on her list:

1. Before you get started, fully flesh out the exact copy you want to use. It’s a pain to go back and change even one word, especially if you’re going to narrate.

2. Keep the text simple. Short sentences. Think about which words and phrases are important from the start so you can later highlight them with a different color or motion.

3. Watch a few tutorials to get a feel for how it will all come together in the end. There are kinetic type tutorials all over the web. I recommend this thorough, step-by-step video tutorial as a starting point.

You can read the rest of the list and Lauren’s post here.

Mindy McAdams pointed in the comments to The Girl Effect video as another great example of storytelling.

And I like this one on Malaria (also by Good magazine):

Pleased I made time this weekend to watch this documentary on data journalism by Geoff McGhee. I came across it on Flowing Data (thanks guys:) who name-check some of the people interviewed:

Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viègas kick things off with some of the work they did with IBM. Then it’s Ben Fry from Fathom, then Jeffrey Heer from Stanford, and then Steve Duenes, Matt Ericson, and Amanda Cox of The New York Times. Later on, there’s some Nicholas Felton on his Feltron Reportand Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen, with several others.

You can watch it below, but I recommend viewing the annotated version which adds links and references as you go. It’s really nicely done.

I grabbed a few links provided in the tools section:

• Protovis: composes custom views of data with simple marks such as bars and dots. Unlike low-level graphics libraries that quickly become tedious for visualization, Protovis defines marks through dynamic properties that encode data, allowing inheritance, scales and layouts to simplify construction.
• Knight Foundation Tutorials on Data Visualisation
• Manyeyes.com
• Uuorld.com : Explain the world with maps
• Google Charts.
• Journalists’ Toolbox: Writing with Numbers
• Just Plain Data Analysis

Journalism in the Age of Data from Geoff McGhee on Vimeo.

While we’re on data, New Zealanders have an opportunity to hear from data journalist David McCandless, author of Information is Beautiful, in February when he appears as a speaker at the Webstock conference. I’m looking forward to it.

Here’s David doing a TED talk:

Patrick Meier on media use of Ushahidi from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.