Archive for category CBC
Mapping the Canadian media landscape
The network map of Canadian media ownership was one of two pieces I was working on for the CBCNews.ca feature package on the future of television. I built it with IBM’s free data visualization tool Many Eyes.
I’m generally pleased with how it turned out, but I think the presentation could be much clearer. I felt the need to make a screencast using Jing to show how to use it.
Newslab.ca contacted me for an email interview about the network map, and I think it addresses some of the concerns I have about the tool. One part of the email I sent that they didn’t use addresses one aspect of the lack of clarity in the map.
The Many Eyes network map was intended for personal relationships, like a Twitter network showing who’s following who, or computer networks showing connections, where there’s no hierarchy.
In the case of the Canadian media map, there’s a clear hierarchy, so it would have been nice to see, for example, parent companies at the top of each cluster, or as a larger node, or in bold, or in bigger text, something to show that these are the companies that own everything “below” them.
If the point of a visualization is to tell a story, the story of the companies at the top of the food chain is one this map doesn’t tell clearly.
Oh, and the other part of Changing Channels I did was this article on Canadian over-the-air digital TV. It turned out well and it’s very pretty well received in the comments.
Sitamaujunngigaqtut
I was watching the CBC coverage of the Nunavut election last night, and listening to the reporters and candidates speaking both English and Inuktitut, sometimes switching back and forth within a sentence.
In particular, they used English numbers when speaking in Inuktitut, and I wondered why. I looked up a tutorial for learning Inuktitut, and I think I found the answer. Here’s the Inuktitut word for “seven”:
?????????? – sitamaujunngigaqtut
If I’m counting right, that’s ten syllables. It takes more syllables to say “seven” in Inuktitut and it does to count to seven in English.
MP voting records
Thanks to The Phantom Observer for reminding me of the idea of online vote tracking for MPs. I e-mailed the guy who runs (or ran) howdtheyvote.ca months ago. It is a lot of work to get that voting data in a usable form. And what votes do you track? Every little motion and amendment? Or just the important stuff? How do you write code that can differentiate that?
I believe he mentioned using a version of Parliament Parser which is used behind the scenes for sites like TheyWorkForYou.com and The Public Whip, both British. The latter’s Ministerial whirl (a Java app that isn’t working for me right now) is a very interesting visualization of cabinet shuffles.
Of course, in the States, all this data is readily available on sites such as the Washington Post’s Votes Database, written by, of course, Adrian Holovaty. It helps that the U.S. government makes so much of its data available in usable (or, at least, scrapable) forms.
Clearly we need to elect more nerds in Canada.
Should we ditch the 1¢ coin?
My article about the Canadian farthing has been reddited.
There’s also a Your View discussion going on.
Update Aug. 8: And dugg!