Many think that the biggest competition to search is presented by social networks. Mark Pincus of Zynga talks about a public and a private web, with an unauthenticated mode addressing a general public, and an authenticated mode based on individual social networks. Websites offering a password-protected, personalized experience will increasingly need to take advantage of social networks to incentivize people to sign up, either by creating new social networks or leveraging existing ones. This evolution will simply serve to further integrate content providers and social platforms, making it easier to recommend and share content with one’s followers or friends. Here, we ourselves are becoming curators for our social network—an authority regarding content that others might find relevant and interesting.

This makes search less important than it used to be, though it still remains the primary authority for the public web. Of course, there are many authoritative and reputable brands among online content providers, from traditional media companies that have translated their offering online, to new content providers that have emerged in the online space, to individual bloggers. The sheer breadth of available content explains why we are increasingly looking towards our social networks to help us regularly digest information. But it also explains why search engines have established themselves as premier authorities for content in the realm of the public web.

Clay Shirk recently wrote a piece about what he calls algorithmic authority: “Authority thus performs a dual function; looking to authorities is a way of increasing the likelihood of being right, and of reducing the penalty for being wrong.  [...] Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying ‘Trust this because you trust me.’”

The first company we think of as having established and capitalized on the notion of algorithmic authority is Google. Google has built its reputation on a perception of neutrality via its PageRank algorithm, which has succeeded phenomenally in providing relevant search results. So while individual recommendations are important relative to the private web, the algorithm has become an equivalent authority for the public web.

Seen in this light, it is no stretch to think of search as moving from a mere navigational tool, to becoming an editorialized space for surfacing content, within the framework of the search algorithm. Search engines are in the unique position to feature specific topics that aggregate a multitude of sources, lending it potentially higher credibility than any single source could assume.

Google News was one of the first attempts at creating an editorialized space by leveraging its search algorithm. A more recent development is Google’s Living Stories, which combines news articles from various sources, over time, to form complete coverage on a particular topic. As Living Stories shows, editorialized search is primarily about aggregation and combination, rather than the decontextualization (the traditional search model).

Microsoft’s Bing features particular pieces of content related to each-other through search queries. The daily image on its homepage links to various search queries corresponding to relevant content types (web sites, videos, images, maps, etc.), showing for example the location of the photograph on a map, in addition to a Wikipedia article and an image search on the subject. Bing’s Visual Search involves linking objects, related by object type and various attributes, to specific search queries, in essence allowing their comparison through quantitative visualization. What makes this approach novel is that it provides an editorialized framework for corresponding information from various sources, via the search algorithm.

While these are all early steps, they compellingly demonstrate the potential of search as a content platform, and point to the future of search engines as providing an alternative, authoritative source to individual recommendations.

In respect to the first mode, the design of websites appears to be converging towards certain conventions, from the typical 3-column layout that most blogs adopt, to arrays of content represented by lists (Craigslist, Delicious) or grids (YouTube, Flickr). Many sites use any combination of the above. One could say that these conventions are the result of the attributes of certain established formats, such as the web browser, the particularities of HTML, and predominant screen sizes and resolutions. Other formats, such as mobile phones and touch displays, have accordingly resulted in their own conventions.

With these conventions comes a certain genericization of structure. One instance is the homogeneous grid, used for arrays of normalized content. The grid has become the default solution in any situation where page real-estate, flat hierarchies and the automation of content are relevant factors. With these considerations in mind, it is hard to imagine a more functional vehicle for content delivery. A grid of normalized content pieces also allows for quantitative visualization opportunities, demonstrated effectively by Pivot, a recent project of Microsoft Live Labs.

Pivot

The homogeneous grid aside, other automatable patterns exist in situations where the content is more nuanced and hierarchical. Good examples are the Times Skimmer and the Times Reader, both of which emphasize featured articles in a flexible grid arrangement.

Times Reader

Grids and lists are a pure expression of a development that I think of as object-oriented design, in which taxonomies are derived from recurring content elements, for the purpose of automation. These forms of organization pertain when all content elements are of equal weight. Not coincidentally, they are also the way in which we are accustomed to viewing content in the case of aggregation—the second mode of content consumption.

One could make the argument that the influence of RSS and search engines, through their respective ease-of-use, has in fact provoked a shift in the design of websites towards normalization, which is to say that the design of websites is converging according to the organizational principles established by aggregation software.

If website structures are becoming more generic, wherein lies the role of design relative to the web?

We are, of course, accustomed to websites existing in various states and levels of detail. Many websites are already platforms with multiple touch points—the site itself; the RSS feed; the mobile or desktop application. Website design could increasingly revolve around individual content elements, rather than the larger, aggregating framework of the site or platform itself.

A “widgetization” of websites would be consistent with the decentralizing tendencies we are already observing, and would have the potential to preserve the identity of the content source at a micro-level, down to the individual piece of media. Of course, this is already happening in some areas: Embeddable content often conveys the identity of the original source. One has only to compare an embedded video from YouTube with a video from Vimeo or similar service. Tweets are also differentiated by design, due to their 140 character limitation.

Applied to all websites and forms of content, this change in focus could become truly paradigm-shifting, allowing for a decentralized content presence without a cumbersome and interchangeable main corpus. Might this in effect lead to a design strategy for linked data?

In parallel to mobile devices, sited media is also becoming less about hardware. We are already living in an environment where information is largely freed from its hardware dependencies. While in the past, specific information was associated with specific hardware, today information is disembodied, accessible, and adaptive—available in various formats and levels of detail suited to the context we absorb it in.

Devices are generally becoming more universal, in terms of the content they are able to display. The same content can now be viewed on a multitude of devices, from laptops to mobile phones. Sited media, too, appears more often than not as an unconstrained, ‘generic’ display surface for information, rather than a content/hardware compound. By not constraining the type of information it can display, sited media places less emphasis on technique or hardware, and more on content.

If, conceptually, we can speak of a physical, tangible plane on the one hand, and an information plane on the other, sited media is at the intersection of the two: it creates moments during which the physical plane, augmented with information, becomes a hybrid space or heterotopia (to borrow from Foucault). For both mobile and sited media, the display will continue to become invisible, while information, in its various levels of detail, will become the primary entity—in some cases referential of place, in other cases defining it.

Organizational Chart of the House Democrats’ Health Plan

A chart depicting the health plan proposed by the House Democrats has recently come to the forefront of the media. It is hard to overlook the rhetorical bias of this visualization—with almost comical overstatement and unnecessary visual complexity it depicts the proposed heath care system through a flow chart consisting of an entangled mess of arbitrarily-colored nodes, positioned with seemingly little rationale. Designed by the office of Rep John Boehner, it makes its rhetorical intent abundantly clear to any conscious observer.

Undoubtedly due to the controversy surrounding the Obama Health Care Plan, the chart has been widely referenced, including by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post in When Health-Care Reform Stops Being Polite and Starts Making Charts, and recently by Infosthetics. Graphic designer Robert Palmer responded by creating a saner, more legible chart from the same source information. In a letter to Rep Boehner he writes: “By releasing your chart, instead of meaningfully educating the public, you willfully obfuscated an already complicated proposal.”

It is certainly not the first time that information design rhetoric has found its way into the political arena, as an earlier visualization of Nancy Pelosi’s Energy Tax from the same Representative’s office demonstrates. Edward Tufte devoted an entire chapter in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information to deceitful information graphics, writing: “For many people the first word that comes to mind when they think about statistical charts is ‘lie.’” True as this may be, those visualizations that appear unbiased and objective may ultimately be more deceitful, as they are accepted without scrutiny.

Rep John Boehner’s flow chart reminds of the inherent rhetorical quality of any visualization—a topic I wrote about earlier. Any chart, graph or dynamic data visualization has an agenda or conceptual model that it reflects, no matter how seemingly objective it is, and no matter whether the author of the piece is conscious of it. Therein lies its rhetoric, whether aimed at explanation or deception. Visualization is rhetorical because its objective is to communicate.

Visualization is a medium, as Eric Rodenbeck has said. And like other media, it contains a fundamental paradox: data visualization creates an expectation of objectivity, yet is inherently rhetorical. This paradox of perception is analogous to photography, which more directly depicts the eye and mind of the photographer, rather than an objective reality. Information visualization is part storytelling, part evidence, and for a visualization to be convincing both need to be considered together. Something the above Health Plan flow chart clearly fails to do.

Mapping Foreclosures in the New York Region

Given that the New York Times Graphics Department is a winner in this year’s National Design Awards, it seemed opportune to look back at some of its recent work. Over the past few years, the Times has published many excellent interactive visualizations as counterparts to the equally brilliant static information graphics found in the paper, including the previously mentioned 31 Days in Iraq by Alicia Cheng. Each interactive is predicated upon a hypothesis and the evidence that supports it. Here, visualization is treated as a medium for journalistic inquiry by creating an editorial framework for the data on display.

Through its relationship to published news articles in the Times, every piece has a specific agenda and questions it seeks to find answers to, which builds immediate engagement with the viewer. A New York Times visualization generally summarizes an issue that has been reported on over a stretch of time, offering analysis and insight while it is still noteworthy. Most visualizations are attributed a specific date and represent a data-snapshot of a particular moment in time. The multivariate data and open-ended modes of interaction allow viewers to ask further questions of the issue and find answers through exploration.

Three of these visualizations have struck me as particularly successful. One of the most recent maps foreclosures in the New York region.

Foreclosures in the New York region (zoomed-in to city level)

The premise of this piece is that foreclosures were most frequent in those areas of the New York region with large minority populations, clearly shown by plotting each foreclosure, aggregated by individual buildings, on a map of the area, in addition to showing the percentage of foreclosures per residential units per census tract. The map makes use of three levels of detail in accordance to zoom-level. At the highest zoom-level, only the census tracts are visible. Zooming in, individual foreclosures by building form clusters around neighborhoods and major roads.

Foreclosures in the New York region (zoomed-in to street level)

At the lowest zoom-level, the granularity increases to show individual streets, blocks and intersections. According to its premise, the visualization highlights the neighborhoods most stricken by the housing crisis, and it turns out that they are indeed areas with high minority populations, including Bushwick in Brooklyn, Jamaica, Queens, and Newark, NJ. In addition to retrieving the exact percentages on hover, one can also move between 2005 and 2009 to see the change in foreclosures over time.

The visualization method takes after Dr. John Snow’s map of the London cholera epidemic and while (like the latter) it is uncertain whether the visualization served to formulate a hypothesis or to validate it, it is nonetheless a very effective use of a geographic scatter plot. Improvements might include more granular hover states to the building level, and aggregate numbers for not only for census tracts and cities, but also neighborhoods and boroughs.

A Year of Heavy Losses is a treemap visualization showing the change in market capitalization of 29 selected financial companies on Wall Street over the course of a year (October 2007 to September 2008).

A Year of Heavy Losses (October 2007)

A Year of Heavy Losses (September 2008)

What makes this visualization successful is its simplicity. The treemap format effectively shows the relative sizes of market cap, and the before/after comparison makes the overall sector loss abundantly clear—with rather brilliant subtlety, the boundary of the October 2007 visualization remains visible in the September 2008 comparison. Through color one is also able to compare five types of financial company: Investment banks, national banks, financial services, regional banks, and asset managers/investors. Finally, the toggle used to switch between years also depicts the size of financial sector in relation to the total stock market. Overall, this is an effective and elegantly compact information graphic.

Casualties of War, finally, offers an on-going analysis of US military fatalities from the Iraq war, by location of death, age, race, military branch, and type of duty.

Casualties of War (initial invasion)

Casualties of War (since troop buildup began)

Casualties of War (home states)

Mike Migurski of Stamen Design reviewed this piece in early 2007. I won’t add much more apart from summarizing the aspects that make it an effective visualization, from the flexibility of the timeline, which not only allows the variable selection of time-ranges, but also charts the number of casualties, to the side-by-side display of multiple data records and the inclusion of preset key milestones. Its data rich presentation allows open-ended exploration with a seemingly infinite number of possible time-ranges.

The characteristically understated (one might say transparent) presentation—showing difference through the smallest possible stylistic variation—respects the gravitas of the subject matter, and the only hint of political affiliation (apart from the choice of subject matter in itself) is the terminology used within the preset milestones. Rounding out the core analysis are stories of the fallen and an expressive visualization of each service member who died in Iraq, represented in a grid in order of death—a virtual memorial.

Following Tufte’s principle of data density, these three interactive pieces, among many others published by the Times, are exercises in the effectiveness of information visualization as a technology, for both sense-making and storytelling.