Digital - Monday, June 15, 2009 21:03 - 1 Comment

Visualization of Canadian media landscape

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.

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