How interactive maps are being used in today’s journalism

Last week, Paul Lewis, a Guardian reporter, linked to a piece of collaborative journalism that he had been working on and had just been published. ‘There can be no better example of how digital technology can hold the state to account than this,’ he wrote on Twitter.

The link in question directed readers towards an interactive map, depicting the movements of the newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, who was unlawfully killed during the G-20 Summit protests in the City of London in 2009.

The interactive map is a clever, clear, accessible piece of journalism. The protestors and police are plotted, mostly huddled about Bank tube station; Ian Tomlinson’s path is shown, zigzagging along St Swithans Lane and on his ill-fated route to Cornhill. PC Harwood’s numerous scuffles with protestors are also documented, starting in Cornhill and extending out to Threadneedle Street and into a side road, where he met with Ian Tomlinson at 7.20 p.m.

Twenty different interactive boxes, beginning before and concluding after the incident between Tomlinson and Harwood, annotate the two men’s paths – all numbered in chronological order. The boxes contain captions, snippets of mobile video clips, CCTV outtakes and snatched photographs taken by protestors.

This is one of the most effective map mashups that I have seen. It portrays a clear yet raw account of what happened on 1 April 2009, using material from a range of non-traditional sources and stitching them all together with code and graphic design. The videos convey the brittle, hostile atmosphere of the day with an immediacy that is difficult to replicate with words. They also carry the additional benefit of being more faithful and incorruptible than human memory. When Paul Lewis claims that there is no better example of how digital technology can hold the state to account, I know what he means.

Interactive maps are a useful tool for journalists, for digital storytellers or for simply setting data out in a digestible way. It’s now more than six years since Google Maps launched and in that time they have been used for all manner of purposes with a steady stream of the latest creations featured on a site called Google Maps Mania.

Still, I wonder if journalists could make more use of these maps. Last week I saw Joseph Stashko give a great example of how a Google Map could be used to visualise the results of local elections in Preston. And there are other tools too, such as UMapper, which allows users to create maps with more flexibility – from basic embeddable maps, to maps of tweets, to specially-tailored weather forecasts and so on.

I’ll finish this post off with a nod to the British Library. Though not a journalistic outlet, they seem to have taken to digital with surprising comfort over the last few years. At the last count they had something like 16 blogs from experts that covered a range of topics. They have released a beautiful iPhone App, which includes material from their ‘treasures collection’, and, during the last of their exhibitions, they produced an interactive map of their own.

The Evolving English Voice Map is a patchwork of different Audioboo recordings, all geo-plotted, that demonstrate different accents from around the world. Is a clever mix of new technology and ancient habits (the pleasure of looking over a map), and it works well. All those who participated were asked to read an extract of a Mr. Tickle story – recording it on their iPhone or computer. The result was a mass of submissions from all around the world, including one listed as Abbots Bromley England 1983 Male – I’ll let you guess who that is.

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Image credit: Chris JL on Flickr – Note, the photograph of the policemen above is not from footage of the G-20 riots in 2009.

Night and Day

The royal wedding and the execution of Osama Bin Laden are a good reminder of how far the news agenda can lurch in the space of a couple of days. On Friday and during the weekend, the run was all for images of expensive dresses, dashing Rolls Royces, cheering crowds and flapping plastic flags. By Monday morning these pictures had been replaced by other more grisly ones, of Bin Laden’s very odd, stark hideaway in rural Abbottabad – his old rooms upturned in the chaos of the gunfight, his carpet smeared in blood, a smashed clock and half-full medicinal bottles on an empty shelf.

Among all the interesting coverage of both these stories are a number of images on Flickr. For some years governments, organisations, political parties and so on have been using Flickr as a medium to publish official photographs and images. A British Monarchy Photostream documents the doings of the royal family and, over the weekend, they uploaded a wide-range of wedding shots that include sets devoted to the balcony scenes, the RAF flyover and a specially-commissioned McVities Cake, which had been requested by Prince William.

More interesting than this, for several reasons, is the Official Whitehouse Photostream. The photos published here are the work of Pete Souza, a photographer who travelled across the Hindu Kush in 2001 to cover the fall of the Taliban and, in 2009, was appointed Official White House Photographer.

Pete Souza’s photographs are remarkably revealing and candid. They give a glimpse into the day-to-day life of the President and his aides, and also the decision-making processes behind important acts of government. The photo at the top of this piece is taken by Souza. It shows Obama, Vice President Biden and other senior members the administration receiving a briefing on Sunday night, a time that was described afterwards by counterterrorism adviser John Brennan as ‘one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time in the lives of the people who were assembled here.’

Souza’s photograph has appeared in the world’s press over the last few days. On a macro level, it is a perfect example of what the French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson referred to as the decisive moment. Obama is hunched forward on his chair, cold eyes on the screen. Hilary Clinton covers her mouth with a hand, concealing an expression which might either suggest shock or concentration. It feels like a decisive moment because the fate of the mission is not yet determined and, on a grander level, Obama’s hopes of re-election next year might even rest on its success.

Social media is helping to expose these moments, even at the top of society, and more transparency can only be a good thing. It connects people to the political process; shows the care and concern of those in power and encourages interaction. I’m writing this at a quarter to twelve in the morning of 4 May and, over the past few days, 1,621,516 people have viewed the image on Flickr – a staggering number.

Just about all of the White House’s images are available to be re-published by others, being licensed under a special category United States Governmental Work. In the UK all of the royal family’s photos and most of those from the Prime Minister’s Official Photostream are produced by the PA, and are therefore protected by copyright.

While I’m going with Flickr, I thought that I’d list some of the other interesting photostreams that are currently being updated. There are four here which are particularly useful for journalists, as they are licensed to be reused:

Metropolitan Police – Great images of events, vehicles and so on.

Cabinet Office – Good quality photos. They include useful profile shots of various politicians like Nick Clegg and Francis Maude

UK Home Office – Day to day work of the department.

HM Treasury – Really useful. Not just day to day work of the department, but also official graphs and stats.

And some others: (mostly unlicensed)

DEFRA UK

Department of Health

UK Labour

Ministry of Justice

BisGovUK

British Library

Conservatives

British Museum

Liberal Democrats

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Image credit – Official WhiteHouse on Flickr

Art, an octopus and social media

Strange things happen in social media. Last night was stranger than normal.

Yesterday morning I was using Twitter to complain about doing Excel spreadsheets at work. I felt, I said, like #afishoutofwater – or, I then wrote, exercising a Spanish idiom, ‘Como un pulpo en un garaje.’ – which translates into English as ‘Like an octopus in the garage.’

Less than 12 hours later a website called Irkafirka published this:

Oddly, I first saw the illustration moments after getting home from El Camino Spanish bar in King’s Cross. And waking up this morning I imagined that I’d probably had a little too much sangria – but, after checking, it’s quite real.

It all stems from an idea that Irkafirka’s founders have had to illustrate a random selection of tweets then publish them as quickly as possible. On their website, they write:

The Rules:

1. Irkafirka is as fresh as possible. We aim to post illustrations within 24 hours of the tweet that inspired them.

2. We are not aquainted with our chosen tweeters. Tweets are chosen by a random process of dipping in and out of the massive data deluge that Twitter has become.

3. Suggestions are warmly welcomed but almost certainly ignored. Which isn’t to say that we don’t have a price. You want a commission, you’ve got to pony up. Call it becoming a patron of the arts.

4. We aim to post illustrations daily, but we have jobs, family and cinema tickets, all of which have to take priority from time to time.

5. If we stop enjoying it, we’ll stop.

6. We can break any of the rules except 5.

There are more illustrations on their website. I think it’s a wonderful idea that will work brilliantly over time – just so long as they can keep it going.

I’m after a copy of my tweet #3125 to hang on the wall, and when I asked if I could buy the artwork they responded with:

Nothing more for me to say to irkafirka then, but THANK YOU VERY MUCH AND I BLOODY LOVE IT.

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Image from Flickr

Irkafirka are @chrisbell @Pockless on Twitter

2005: social media?

About five years after its launch, last Sunday evening, You Tube announced that they are now receiving two billion hits per day. On their official blog they wrote:

Five years ago, after months of late nights, testing and preparation, YouTube’s founders launched the first beta version of YouTube.com in May, with a simple mission: give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world. Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself. [Link to full post]

Not only is the two billion milestone noteworthy, but the fact that the site is five years old is also well worth noting.

There’s a good argument that 2005 was the pivotal year in the shaping of the Internet as we know it. You Tube was founded, Mark Zuckerberg opened Facebook up to schools across America, and Yahoo acquired two year-old Del.icio.us and one year-old Flickr.

For the sake of nostalgia, here is what some of these websites looked like back then, five years ago.

• You Tube

Billed rather simply as a digital photo repository back in 2005 – their logo has hardly changed a bit in the last five years. The homepage design obviously owes quite a bit to Google’s, who, in any case, bought the site in November 2006 for $1.65 billion.

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• Google

In 2005 Google was already looking fairly grown up and confident. Very few changes were made to this minimalist homepage design until just a few weeks ago.

You’ll spot here that back then Google were busy promoting Froogle, their price comparison service which was later rebranded as Google Product Search.

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• Blogger

In May 2005, blogger was already six years old. Therefore it predates Web 2.0 and is one of a few notable survivors of the Dot Com Crash in 2000. It had been acquired by Google in 2003 and by the time of this screenshot it was by far the most popular blogging software available.

In May 2005 they launched Blogger Mobile, which allowed people to blog by text message –making them, by my reckoning, just about two years too early.

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• WordPress

WordPress would supplant Blogger in popularity over the next few years. It’s interesting to note, however, their reasons for encouraging people to use their software. ‘You can stop sending mass emails to everyone’, ‘You can archive your thoughts’ and ‘Why the heck not?’

Indeed.

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• Facebook

Facebook has retained this familiar feel from the start, but its evolution has been a little more complex than most.

Back in 2005 there were two Facebooks, one for people in college and one for people in high school. All the dots would be joined up over the next year as it began the march that would see it become the most popular site in America.

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• The BBC

Back in 2005 I had never written a blog, had never used Facebook and only seen a handful of You Tube videos, but I was already mildly addicted to the Internet. And from a sunny Madrid and a fitful Internet connection, the BBC’s official site was where I spent most of my time.

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• The Guardian

And 2005 was a time before guardian.co.uk existed. Back then it was known as the Guardian Unlimited – a website that promised such things as ‘All the headlines from today’s first edition.’

From that I suppose you can summise that the website was still being considered as some kind of digital reflection of the newspaper – and not really a strong publication in its own right.

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• Flickr

Flickr now hosts more than four billion images and is the most popular image sharing site on the web. Back in 2005 PC World were offering them some kind words:

‘Cutting edge real-time photo sharing’, they said. They were right.

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• And in 2006 … Twitter

Twitter didn’t exist in 2005 and it wouldn’t appear properly until more than a year or so later. Therefore it’s just tagged on to the end of this post. It’s a good demonstation of  just what can be done in four years with a scruffily designed website, a clever idea and a willingness to stick with your logo through thick and thin.

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Top image credit: TonVC on Flickr

Screen shots pulled out of the Way Back Machine

14,000 words per day

It’s worth taking a moment to thank Andrew Sparrow for locking himself up in the Guardian’s offices for the last month and producing a great live blog of the General Election campaign and the eventual change of government.

He’s written an interesting piece on the practicalities of live blogging and how writing up to 14,000 words a day gave him a unique insight into the campaign. Sparrow’s a fan of the art and so am I. Live blogging is another skill that should be incorporated into practical journalism qualifications.

Interestingly, he writes:

“If journalism is the first draft of history, live blogging is the first draft of journalism.”

It’s a great line, and it certainly has merit. But Sparrow’s blog was also a collection of information from elsewhere: quotes from MPs on Twitter, the recording of Gordon Brown and bigotgate on Audioboo, the photos of Cameron and the Queen on Twitpic and so on.

Therefore, perhaps I could amend Sparrow’s statement slightly and suggest that social media is the first draft of journalism?

Anyway. Here’s a very quick sketch of how news was reported throughout the General Election campaign.

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Image credit: C4Chaos

Image credit: My David Cameron

How to laugh at a politician

On election morning I thought it’d be a good idea to look back at the last few months’ online political satire. I’m not sure that it has been quite the digital election that I was anticipating, with TV being, if anything, the defining medium, but the Internet has certainly added something.

And here is a quick round up of the best digital satire.

1. My David Cameron

A website set up in January this year by by Clifford Singer, creative director at Sparkloop graphic design agency, shortly after David Cameron’s heavily airbrushed face appeared on 759 billboards about the country.

The site received 90,000 unique visitors in two weeks, with anyone able to share their version of the Cameron poster.

2. #itsnicksfault

After a furious press turned on Nick Clegg for daring to become popular without their support, their negative headlines were ridiculed on Twitter as Rory Cellan Jones explains in this blog post. Some of his highlights being:

“Just had a giant chocolate eclair with cream. All #nickcleggsfault”
“We’ve run out of houmous #NickCleggsfault”
“Pompey not being allowed to play in Europe. #nickcleggsfault”
“Got rid of the wasp and a new wasp has arrived. #nickcleggsfault”
“I got my debit card stolen #nickcleggsfault”

3. Charlie Brooker in the Guardian

Charlie Brooker has been on enormously good form in the last few weeks. I think my favourite paragraph of his was this, just after the final leaders’ debate:

According to some polls, Cameron won, or at the very least tied with Clegg. Which is odd, because to my biased eyes, he looked hilariously worried whenever the others were talking. He often wore a face like the Fat Controller trying to wee through a Hula Hoop without splashing the sides, in fact. Perhaps that’s just the expression he pulls when he’s concentrating, in which case it’s fair to say he’d be the first prime minister in history who could look inadvertently funny while pushing the nuclear button.

[Charlie Brooker - BBC debate was a cross between Songs of Praise and Over the Rainbow]

4. The Daily Mash

Odd and shocking as ever, the writers at the Daily Mash have obviously enjoyed the fact that there is an election on:

Clegg to clean up politics using his personal bank account – [link]

BNP launches aryan spread – [link]

Brown to be turned into glue – [link]

5. The election debates and social media

As Shane Richmond explains here, watching the leaders’ debates with Twitter added an extra dimension to the whole thing. Facebook was pretty good too.

6. Matt on the General Election

A cross over from the mainstream media here, but it’s well worth checking out Matt’s bank of General Election cartoons at the Telegraph. There’s a particularly good one of David Cameron pestering a sleeping couple.

7. Nope

Currently doing the rounds on Twitter. Published in response to the Sun’s front page.

Image taken from Mattlays’ Twitpic.

UPDATE 8am: It’s only an hour since I posted this, but already Liberal Conspiracy are publishing lots of different variations of the Cameron frontpage. It’s an echo of the airbrush moment, and it’s interesting to wonder what effect it will have – if any – on polling day.

8. The Peter Mandleson Experience

And, lastly of all, this video of Peter Mandleson and Gordon Brown having a jam is quite brilliant.

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Right. Enough silliness – I’ve got to decide who to vote for.