I’ve started drafting three articles in the last 24 hours for this blog only to find a better one on the same subject written by someone else.
Firstly, it’s a regular theme here that data visualisations are a huge opportunity for us all because they allow us to break the monopoly that civil servants, sloppy journalists [...]
Posts under ‘Imagery’
Three signposts off
Gentle mockery
It’s Friday. And it’s nearly hometime. Let’s just pop over to the Glum Councillors tumblr site to see if there’s anything to look at?
Well, there’s Cllr Doherty (pictured):
“If this corner doesn’t qualify as a dangerous bend, I don’t know what does,” said Cllr Doherty standing at the corner … in the road … with his back [...]
Using a weblog crowdsource intelligence
I’ve been working with Mick Fealty over at the Northern Ireland political weblog Slugger O’Toole on a bit of an experiment. We decided to try and convene some free consultancy for all of the political parties in Northern Ireland – starting with the ruling (!) bloc, the DUP.
As with all political weblogs that host antagonistic [...]
Two applications worth looking at
Two things.
This is ‘why pie charts stink’ – a nice programme for visualising data:
Dashboard 1
Powered by Tableau
Secondly, further to Andrew’s Poblish posts, I’ve just revisited Debatepedia. I met one of the Debatepedia team last year at the WeMedia conference and I had to say at the time that it didn’t seem to be quite [...]
A feast of infographics
As I’ve spent a lot of time recently banging on about visual representations of policy issues, this post on the GOOD website is something of a feast.
More data for you
Another day, another step in the right direction. Boris Johnson is opening up around 200 datasets about London along with an offer of from Channel 4’s 4iP fund of up to £200,000 to help developers to create innovative applications that use it.
Why is this exciting to anyone with an interest in local democracy? Well, it [...]
Illustrating data (again)
It’s Christmas. That means that you have to indulge bloggers in their little obsessions.
Mine is an interest in the way that data can be presented in a way that changes our perception of an issue and clarifies a problem.
This one, for instance from Good Magazine:
You can zoom around and explore it here. (Via Information is [...]
Visualising population shifts
I’d like to show you this video for two reasons.
Firstly, it’s an interesting talk that I found very instructive. It is worth watching it right to the end.
Secondly, it shows how a creative use of illustrative tools can help to improve policymaking. If all evidence given to elected representatives was of this quality, I suspect [...]
The birth of cool?
Last week, the Guardian carried a feature on ‘The Coolest Mayor in America‘ – John Fetterman of Braddock, Pennsylvania.
Fetterman’s success raises a few slightly trivial aesthetic questions about what it takes to be a successful politician. It also raises bigger, more profound ones as well.
Fetterman doesn’t look like the traditional buttoned up political clone. He [...]
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
