: for data viz junkies

View Election Margins

Regardless of your political associations, you will have to agree that this is an extremely simple, elegant and well designed solution for viewing election results from the NY Times. No surprises here I guess, since I think most have come to expect this type of execution from their great team of interactive designers.

In an election season with so many ups and downs as well as the amazingly thinly sliced and diced demographic results, its great to see it all in one place in a rich yet easily understood format.

I heard recently of the notion that Data Visualization as a medium for human communication is replacing or becoming more important than Narrative. Some believe that the form of Narrative is more appropriate for communicating ideas in a society with relatively small amounts of stored data or knowledge. With the modern advent of the digital database, and exponentially increasing amounts of storage capability as well as information that needs to be stored, a new way of communicating is evolving or is said to be needed.

It's an intoxicating idea isn't it? A new way of communication based on database information and an evolving visual language that is being formed by a global and collective army of designers and coders.

However, I think this misses some important points and can be easily understood by the example shown above.

Where in this visualization do we see the references to the historic and groundbreaking stories that define these candidates? Where are the human stories that created their character (or lack thereof depending on your perspective) or even these characters framed within our ongoing national conversation, or if you like, narrative?