Rabu, 21 Maret 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Typographic capitals: ProPublica shares a tool for easy state maps

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 10:53 AM PDT

I’m pretty sure there isn’t a category for Best Use of Webfont Formats, so ProPublica will probably have to remain happy with the two Pulitzer Prizes it’s already won. But a tiny little project out of the nonprofit news giant is worth an attaboy.

ProPublica just released StateFace, a webfont that, in place of standard letters, contains maps of the 50 states. (Plus the District of Columbia. Sorry, Guam.) Dingbat fonts are nothing new, and Unicode has helped bring font-characters-as-tiny-graphics closer to the mainstream.

But StateFace is purpose-driven, marrying typographic technology with editorial needs. ProPublica’s using it as an easy way to get state maps onto its Super PAC tracking page. You embed the font files as you would any other webfont, with a simple CSS call from your server.

Here’s the Gulf Coast, for instance. (Warning: This won’t look right in an RSS feed or some other non-web environment, I’d wager.)

qRYBJI

On the back end, those states are really just the random-looking string “qRYBJI”; R equals Louisiana, J equals Georgia, and so on. You can select them with your mouse and copy them into a text file if you want.

And the glyphs are detailed enough that they can be scaled up quite large. Here’s Louisiana at 300-point, and just for fun, crawfish red:

R

(We Louisianans wish our southeastern coastline was still that lush and full, but that’s another story.)

The vagaries of web typography also mean you can do things like italicize a state — imagine a strong breeze was coming in from north Texas:

R

ProPublica’s Scott Klein is proud of the little details:

From what I can tell from the github repo, Jeff Larson and Klein were the main drivers behind the project. (An exercise left to the reader: Be the first person to make a complete map of the United States using this webfont and CSS absolute positioning.)

Now, I imagine that “making fonts with tiny maps in them” probably didn’t rank high on the Sandlers’ wish list when they gave the initial gift to fund ProPublica. But nonetheless, once the developers went through the trouble of solving their own problem, they took the extra step of releasing their work for others to use.

It remains one of my favorite things about ProPublica that it is so committed to sharing both its work and the tools it builds to create that work. Read its Nerd Blog and you’ll find tools like Simple Tiles (a map imaging tool), a small stepper graphic library, TimelineSetter (for, duh, timelines), a guide for scraping data from the web, a tool for connection graphics, and more.

Those are all valuable additions to the journalist-coder toolkit. So even though I don’t imagine I’ll ever have a use for an inline map of New Mexico, I raise a toast to the open-source sensibilities of ProPublica’s nerds.

Liveblog: Alexander Howard on lessons for government from open source and open journalism

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 09:28 AM PDT

Alexander Howard, O’Reilly Media’s Gov 2.0 correspondent, came to Cambridge Tuesday to give a talk at Harvard’s Berkman Center about how the technologies that shaped the Internet have transformed how societies communicate and how government interacts with its citizens. Howard said citizen hackers and journalist are playing an important role in broadening the open data movement by building applications and other services that governments alone could not create. The future of how we use data will be social and mobile, Howard said, as the focus turns to how we connect with others and improve our communities.

I covered the event in a liveblog, you can also watch a replay of Howard’s talk in Berkman’s interactive archive.

Knowledge is a property of the network: Mapping Britannica’s world in a Wikipedia age

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 07:52 AM PDT

At The New Republic, David A. Bell offers a wistful threnody for the paper edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which the eponymous publishing house announced it would cease publishing after 244 years. “With the disappearance of paper encyclopedias, a part of the Western intellectual tradition is disappearing as well,” argues Bell, the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of History at Princeton and a New Republic contributing editor. The problem, he avers, is not the medium itself; the web offers comprehensiveness, currency, and serendipity, affordances it shares with the multi-volume sets of old:

But the great paper encyclopedias of the past had other, grander ambitions: They aspired to provide an overview of all human knowledge, and, still more boldly, to put that knowledge into a coherent, logical order. Even if they mostly organized their articles alphabetically, they also sought ways to link the material together thematically — all of it…On Wikipedia, contributors do constantly try to update many different related articles to take account of new material they introduce. But Wikipedia, of course, has no plan, no system, no map of human knowledge.

The problem, however, isn’t that we’ve grown complacent about the nature of knowledge, but that the nature of knowledge is changing in the context of networks. The vision of knowledge as paradigmatic, structured, ordered, like the hierarchy of the church and the deputations of sovereignty, was very much a product of encyclopedism’s golden age, the eighteenth century. Indeed, Diderot and his cohort sought for secular knowledge the kind of power and authority reserved for the monarchy and the magisterium of the Church. It’s a theory of knowledge in keeping with its time — although Diderot and his contemporaries already recognized the problematic nature of any single specified taxonomy of knowledge; the rule of the alphabet offered not only a handy organizing schema, but a leveling arbitrariness as well. But these means of ordering knowledge are thoroughly out of step in our own omnivalent age, which finds us suspicious of expertise, more comfortable with the iterative and approximate.

The old sovereign paradigms of encyclopedic knowledge were on the wane long before Wikipedia. By the twentieth century, encyclopedism’s grand epistemological project had been blackboxed, dumbed down, and commodified for aspirant middlebrow readers, the disruptive ambition of Diderot sold door-to-door. As a project, the encyclopedia was bracing and grand; as product, EB was just another widget courting obsolescence. As Tim Carmody pointed out in a recent deftly-observed article at Wired, it wasn’t Wikipedia, but Encarta — the wholly-insufficient electronic encyclopedia Microsoft bundled with Windows throughout the 1990s — which doomed the paper encyclopedia:

Not because Encarta made Microsoft money (it didn't), or because Britannica didn't develop comparable products for CD-ROM and the web (they totally did, with the first CD-ROM encyclopedia in 1989 and Britannica Online in 1994). Instead, Encarta was an inexpensive, multimedia, not-at-all comprehensive encyclopedia that helped Microsoft sell Windows PCs to families. And once you had a PC in the living room or den where the encyclopedia used to be, it was all over for Mighty Britannica.

And yet we shouldn’t mistake a practical bent for a lack of ambition — Wikipedia maps knowledge as ambitiously as the encyclopedia of old; only its cartography is different. Indeed, mapping is woven into the very structure and method of Wikipedia itself; it isn’t found in orderings and topics, but in the network-locative irruptions of facticity and assertion, citation and correction that make up the entries. Fully documented on the “talk page” of each Wikipedia entry, these records of individual edits and vettings comprise a map of knowledge as it lives in a networked world. As David Weinberger points out in Too Big to Know, his rich, ambivalently hopeful book about the emergent nature of knowledge, network effects create more than new means of dissemination:

That knowledge is a property of the network means more than that crowds can have a type of wisdom in certain circumstances…it’s not simply that under some circumstances groups are smarter than there smartest member. Rather, the change in the infrastructure of knowledge is altering knowledge’s shape and nature…knowledge is becooming inextricable from — literally unthinkable without — the network that enables it.

Britannica will continue to produce the continuously-updated digital edition of the Encyclopedia (disclosure: I blogged for EB a few years ago, and briefly worked as a permissions assistant at the publisher’s Chicago office after college — but my encyclopedia of choice was the time capsule of the 1959 World Book my parents kept tucked away in a glass-fronted book case behind the armchair in the living room). For the digital edition to thrive as long as the gilt volumes did, it won’t need the austere taxonomies and abridging ambitions of old, but a willingness to yield its energies to the cartographic ambitions of the network.

This post originally appeared at the blog of metaLAB (at) Harvard, a research and teaching collaborative dedicated to exploring the frontiers and overlooked histories of networked culture in the arts and humanities. We can see their office from our window. Matthew Battles is metaLAB’s managing editor and cofounder of HiLobrow.

Encyclopedia photo by John Morrison used under a Creative Commons license.

The Newsonomics of Mr. Daisey’s media blur

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 07:00 AM PDT

Was it journalism, performance art, political provocation, or just a hell of a good story? Was it a great truth, a great lie, or somewhere in between?

This American Life’s retraction (good NPR explainer here) of Mike Daisey’s January piece on Apple’s factories in China has unleashed a cascade of reaction and rethinking. It’s been a chain reaction, with the episode connecting up all our next-era hopes and fears.

The much-decorated (Peabody, Polk, DuPont-Columbia, Murrow awards) This American Life is 16 years old now, and fundamentally a radio program. But the “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” show showed real new-media power, becoming TAL’s most downloaded podcast ever at 880,000 downloads — a sure measure of its virality. (In that follow-on impact, it reminds us of the power of Katie Couric’s 2008 interview with Sarah Palin — an interview whose web afterlife made many more waves than the initial broadcast.)

Why are we seeing such a fuss? The two big reasons, I believe: the impact the story had, and our increasingly uneasy footing in the blurring media landscape.

The 39-minute Daisey piece did what dozens of previous stories on Foxconn’s massive manufacturing of our Apple (and other) wonders hadn’t accomplished: It captured listeners’ imaginations.

Why? Daisey turned our portable pleasures to guilty ones. Talking with Chinese workers, he connected our pleasures to their pain — 18-hour days, chemical poisonings, suicides, and more. He tempered the guilt with a decent pro and con discussion of how even odious sweatshop jobs have long lifted generations into the bottom rungs of middle class existences in many nations.

TAL pricked the consciences of 1.8 million This American Life listeners, a group you’ve got to expect includes a disproportionate number of Apple users. Then, within two weeks, The New York Times began publishing a series on Apple, China, job creation, and Foxconn. Where Daisey made Americans care anew, the Times did what it does best: It hammered at the Foxconn record, detailing it with exhaustive reporting and all the data it could uncover.

Tales of Foxconn abuse go back years, but never seemed to pique the public’s imagination. The combination of This American Life emotionally tinged story and the Times’ work — seemingly on the heels of Daisey’s tale, but with reporting that had been months in the making — pushed the issue to new heights. We saw a high-voltage online public interest campaign ignite, producing a quarter of a million signatures. Congress joined the fray, indignation rising and providing good opportunities for photo-ready public outrage. Finally, Apple, reaping huge profits (and now granting bonanza dividends) by punting around the issue for years, seemed to take it more seriously, engaging with the Fair Labor Association “to end sweatshop conditions.”

That’s a lot of impact, and Daisey’s piece played a clear role in the chain of events.

Now we understand that Daisey included some reporting, some surmising, and some conflating in his Foxconn tales. Maybe that’s not a huge surprise, given his long career in performance, in storytelling, a craft in which the moving around of facts to better tell a story is the how the art form works.

Of course, that’s not how journalism works. When you hear talk about a new “ecosystem,” a word that understandably drives some people in the news business nuts, we can see its uneasy and only partially charted taxonomy in the Daisey story.

Which brings us back to the second big reason we’re hearing such debate: We’re having a hard time defining the journalism — and the other stuff — that digital media either creates, or amplifies.

It’s a bigger and bigger media blur out there, and the tablet has only further softened our vision. On an iPad, does NPR qualify as radio, audio, or a news site, with half or more of its stories text-only? Is The Wall Street Journal still a newspaper with its all-but-devoid-of-text WSJ Live video news app? Are the NBC Local sites broadcast websites or city sites that look awfully like newspaper ones? You can’t tell the players apart like you used to; there’s no new scorecard.

We’ve seen other hand-wringing twists on this storyline. Are bloggers journalists? No, not most, but some. Are journalists bloggers? Yes, some. Can we believe what bloggers write? Yes, some of the time, depending on who they are, for whom they work, and what we know about them. We’re still coming to grips with these overlapping lines, and we can the same kinds of issues here in the Daisey story and retraction. In a sense, TAL’s dilemma parallels that gap in our new taxonomy, our new way of explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others.

In his strongly worded retraction, TAL host Ira Glass, of course, tried to parse this still-being-charted landscape. Glass attempted to get ahead of an avalanche of “new media” criticism now falling. “See, you can’t trust those guys,” is the sentiment, both public and private, we can expect to hear from many quarters. “That’s not journalism.”

Offered Glass: “We’re horrified to have let something like onto public radio. Our program adheres to the same journalistic standards as other national shows, and in this case, we did not live up to those standards.”

Note that the New York Public Theater, in standing behind its decision to complete its current run of Daisey’s stage show, said in its statement: “Mike is an artist, not a journalist. Nevertheless, we wish he had been more precise with us and our audiences about what was and wasn’t his personal experience in the piece.” Daisey himself, caught between several worlds, “stands by his work,” but notes he “not a journalist.”

The two statements from Glass and the Public Theater seem to define two separate things: theater and journalism. Yet, by the nature of the revolution TAL has spawned, theatrical storytelling aids the journalism. In fact, it directly excerpted its Daisey program from his still-playing one-man show. Consequently, that line between journalism and theatrical storytelling isn’t as easily defined as Ira Glass’s statement would make it seem. In fact, when Glass talks about “other national shows,” we’ve got to wonder which ones he means. “Show” is of course an old show business term; newsies tend to go beyond the Anglo-Saxon to the more serious-sounding “program.” Where do we place Radiolab and The Moth, both of which owe legitimization to TAL?

Complicating our understanding is that TAL’s habit of reaching out to non-traditional storytellers is one of its greatest strengths.

It’s funny, though, but I never expected This American Life to adhere to the same standards as The New York Times. In the stories of David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, and David Rakoff, and in providing a forum for non-journalistically trained storytellers, as well as journalists, we’ve seen the bounds of our understanding expanded on everything from the financial crisis to infidelity to what happens when humans and fowl collide (in its “sort of annual Poultry Slam!”). That seminal financial crisis story — “The Giant Pool of Money” — won lots of awards and forced more people to take TAL seriously. Its co-creator Adam Davidson now co-hosts NPR’s (and TAL’s) Planet Money, which we hear from more and more on All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

What has distinguished This American Life through 459 episodes has been its breadth. It could be haunting, horrifying, or hilarious, and often some combination of emotions that one-note traditional media often keep in check. I was entertained while I learned about something. I can’t recall being bored.

So, yes, let’s debate the definitions. Let’s try define the turf, as we see in such recent initiatives as Simon Dumenco’s Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation. Let’s remember that the Internet is a remarkable, if gawky, self-correcting organism. (It was the reporting of Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz that uncovered the Daisey inaccuracies. It’s worth pointing out: public radio is helping clean up a mess created by…public radio.)

Let’s not, though, retreat to our traditional corners.

Was Mike Daisey a liar, or merely deeply disingenuous? (Poynter’s Craig Silverman does a good job of picking apart the trail of words.)

As an artist, he deals in truths. As journalists, we don’t have the poetic luxury to rearrange facts in time and place. That’s always been and should be an essential boundary of our craft. Yes, it seems strange having to explain that facts shouldn’t be rearranged for the sake of dramatic power or clarity — but, then again, as journalists we’ve never explained quite that well how what we do is different.

The key here is not to build a wall, but to disclose the blur — explain to listeners, viewers, and readers who did the work, and within what bounds. Just last week, Greg Smith’s explosive Goldman Sachs piece in The New York Times made its own news, and no one mistook it for journalism — it was interpreted through a set of conventions we worked out long ago called the op-ed page.

Our times call for recognizing The Big Tent that the digital world has popped open. We can better define its rooms, but for the sake of all traditional media, from newspapers to yes, 40-year-old public radio, best to make that tent big and wide. That’s what we as an audience want, and that’s what will help pay the bills for the news-gathering itself.

di