The CBC’s John Bowman is at it again. In May he mapped the organizational structure of Canwest using IBM’s Many Eyes and this time the associate producer with CBCNews.ca created a visualization of Canada’s complete media landscape.

The ability to manipulate and visualize data is innovative, certainly, but it can be cumbersome and lacking analysis or interpretation. The potential lies in reader engagement, but if the reader is alienated or confused or impatient, the information reaches one less person.

However, as Bowman says, he could have written an article on media ownership or charted the relationships, but the map gets at the crux of the issue: the interconnected nature of Canada’s media. He told Newslab.ca:

Ideally, visualizations present a great deal of information much more quickly than text of the same information.

The constellation imagery hinges on the interpretation of the data, and despite the limitations of the mapping software, is a more effective way to show (not tell) the story of corporate Canadian media ownership.

Bowman created a screencast to show readers how to manipulate the map and admits the application has its limitations:

Many Eyes is a very interesting tool, and it’s free, so it’s hard to complain about what it does or doesn’t do. That said, editing this map was a huge pain. It plots the data as it sees fit, but I had to select and move the nodes individually to clean it up (yes, it was even more messed-up to begin with).

Readers will also come across hic-ups they might not be able to solve without this piece of information:

The search function on the map isn’t very useful. You have to type the exact name of a node before it will light up for you. So, if you type “Torstar” (case-sensitive, by the way) into the search field, the node will light up. But if you’re looking for your local radio station, you might not know that the node is called “CHVR Pembroke, Ont.” especially if you know it as “Star 96.”

And for the sake of creators and editors, according to Bowman, the mapping process needs fine-tuning:

The other big problem is that you can’t edit the data table once you’ve uploaded it. There are two mistakes that I know of that I’d like to fix, but I can’t unless I upload the edited dataset and recreate the network map from scratch. And the new map won’t look anything like the old one: the relationships would be the same, but the locations would be all jumbled up.

But Bowman doesn’t dispute the value of mapping as journalism; data visualization can be taken in a lot of different directions to illustrate numerous different messages.

All of Inflation’s Little Parts is a stained-glass-inspired, interactive diagram by the New York Times that plots the spending habits of Americans over the course of 12 months, ending in March 2008. With the map, readers can interpret raw data to draw their own conclusions, but what the numbers don’t do is tell us why. For instance, spending on automobiles was down 1.1 per cent from the previous year yet Americans spent 26 per cent more on gasoline.

The publication’s visualization labs allow readers to play with data at will.

Also, The Guardian put the expenses claimed by British MPs on their site in a Google spreadsheet, allowing readers to determine what they need to know and giving them the tools to check on their elected representatives.