Pittsburgh Penguins’ Interactive graphic

By Adelyn Biedenbach, Leanna Talarico and Colleen Ferguson

Our idea  is to turn the Pittsburgh Penguins’ statistics, based on this website, into an interactive web graphic. The main data that we would focus on would be individual player stats, including games played, goals scored, assists, points and +/-.

The way we would like to show this is through individual players being made clickable. As the skater comes to the forefront, his individual statistics would be featured, instead of listed in a chart like this page of the website. Clicking on the player would also make him move, making the graphic more engaging and the statistics more accessible.

Where are CNN’s interactive graphics?

I’ve been following CNN as a news source fairly closely and loyally for a few years now, and never more so than these past few months. There are some things CNN does really well – video, of course, being primarily a broadcast news source; its text-based stories are also really well written and informative. Both of these ensure I am getting the most up-to-date information about any breaking news event or topical situation.

One thing I have noticed CNN does not do as well? Multimedia. I have struggled to find anything beyond a photo slideshow for additional multimedia, and information graphics are all but not existent. And interactive graphics? I don’t think CNN has produced one in over a year.

The most recent interactive graphic I could find was when the organization covered the census poll conducted by the government in 2010. In its first interactive graphic since the 2008 presidential election, this graphic serves as a source of information to readers about the changing state of the nation, economically and population-wise, as a result of the findings of the census.

I think this graphic is really well constructed, despite a few flaws. I especially like how the map can be personalized through a drop down bar, which allows the user to determine if they would like to see results of population change:

Or how the economy has changed by state over the past 10 years:

Additionally, with each of these specialized views, more statistics can be chosen to highlight. The user can determine if they would like to view the information by county, state, or census tract. For population, it can also be broken down further to highlight specific demographics:

At the same time, some of the information is not entirely clear for the user. The graphic uses a color scale to represent data, but the key to explain the colors is not detailed enough. For this example of total population, the key, which also changes for each personalized selection, says the lightest color of orange represents 0, and the dark orange represents 37,452. Common sense tells me this number must represent people per square mile, but it is never made entirely clear, therefore the user is always wondering what information he or she is looking at.

Despite the struggles with the key, this graphic is really easy to use, highly informative and relatively easy to understand. The ability to specialize how the information is represented – by state, county or census tract – also depicts the level of depth CNN reporters went to gather this information. This blocking technique also allows the user to determine how he or she would like the information on the map to be visually represented.

This graphic is more of a source of information, rather than a stand-alone news source. If I were to write a story about the census, I would turn to this map for visual elements, or for a visual representation of specific numbers acquired for the story. The confusion with the key does not allow for the graphic to stand by itself. Also, the graphic cannot zoom into specific locations to provide minute details of local areas. This leaves the reader only able to access information on a national level, where local levels might be what the reader is looking to discover. Adding an additional feature for the user to look up specific census numbers for a local area would have made this graphic a stand-alone piece.

Vandana Shiva visits Point Park

Dr. Vandana Shiva visited Point Park University last week to discuss her views on globalization developments and the importance of local farming techniques. Check out an audio slideshow of her visit below.

CHANNA NEWMAN: Good evening, and welcome to Point Park University’s fourth annual Global Cultural Studies speaker series. Dr. Vandana Shiva, our guest tonight, has been demonstrating convincingly through her work, her books, and her speeches, that the interestests of the peple of this earth are critical to the survival of the planet and essential to our independence and well-being.

NARRATION: Pioneering the Navdanya movement in her native India, Shiva fights for the empowerment of local farmers and diversity of farming. Addressing a standing-room-only crowd in the GRW Theater on Wednesday, Nov. 2, Shiva shared her support of technologies that proves the ecological value of traditional local farming, as well as fight against big globalization and development projects.

VANDANA SHIVA: The monoculture of the mind has become such a severe threat to the future of the world. It’s become a severe threat because it’s allowing that rule of the 1 percent. Because that 1 percent arrogates to itself the power that only my mind counts, only my wealth counts, only my decision-making counts.  It is impoverishing the world democratically, it is impoverishing the world ecologically, it is impoverishing the world economically. And the only way we can get out of it to put the earth biodiversity, people and their diversity, at the center of creating what I call earth democracy, the democracy of all life on this planet. Celebrating the capacity of every being, every person.

NARRATION: Many Point Park University students were given the opportunity for extra credit for sociology classes by attending Shiva’s speech. One student will be writing a paper about how Shiva’s lecture related to topics explored in her class.

AMANDA SCHUTZMAN: What stuck out the most to me was when she mentioned about the number of farmers that commit suicide because of the effects of the different organizations and what they have on their farms.

NEWMAN: Can any of that genetically modified stuff be reversed?

SHIVA: When you start doing organic farming, for example, within two seasons, the soil organisms start to come back, the toxins start to go down, so what basically happens is when the healing starts to takes place, or ecosystems of soils or people of society, you get a shrinkage of the space of the toxic. I think we will create another future. You bring back crops that they haven’t genetically engineered, you’re whole ecosystem goes in a different ecological and evolutionary path, so I think another future is possible.