Free the Data - Multimedia
On of my faves is the Free Our Data: The Blog from the UK Guardian. Imagine educated journalists writing intelligently and critically about access to public data! Compare that to Canada’s journalists who only use the four letter word - data - via the word census! The Civicaccess.ca group will hopefully change that this year.
Today, a fantastic article Why Making Statistics Free Saves Lives features the work of Hans Rosling a professor of International Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden demonstrates how public data in the public’s hands can yield much better decisions to improve people’s lives. He developed a series of excellent multimedia visualizations about using statistics to enlighten.
Hans also produces content for Gapminder.org a website dedicated to:
Making sense of the world and having fun with statistics
and is
a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development. This is done in collaboration with universities, UN organisations, public agencies and non-governmental organisations.
Be sure to go and play with the data in their Google Graphs tool! Fun! And for great education viewing watch the 18 min video on Ted blog where Hans demos some of his work. I was also just alerted to a google talk (via Robin).
True, the tools are in flash, but alas, until which time the geeks produce some nice and easy to use graphical UI open source and standards tools/widgets/modules to create these kinds of visualization we will have proprietary one off objects! Sooooo……
“Imagine educated journalists writing intelligently”
We try to imagine that! Thank you for the charming compliment and feel free to chip in to the debate.
m
Comment by Michael Cross — January 12, 2007 @ 1:10 pm
Thanks Michael. Just in case you did not know, we have been receiving plenty of Bush dodgers to Canada, some Blair dodgers from our former colonialist would be most acceptable! Think of all the writing potential!
;)
t
Comment by Administrator — January 12, 2007 @ 2:15 pm