We’re off to London again, this time to present at WAN-IFRA’s 2013 Digital Media Europe conference. Our CEO Oliver Mooney will be joining fellow Irish speakers NewsWhip founder Paul Quigley, Neil O’Connor of BlockMetrics, and Irish Times Chief Innovation Officer, Johnny Ryan.

The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, or WAN-IFRA, is a trade association that covers all aspects of news publishing, and we’re excited to be part of this year’s conference. The focus is on industry shifts and content monetisation, and the lineup includes new, old, big, and small media. It’s not just app downloads and paywalls: digital-led news means totally rethinking the way we understand the relationship between content and business, without losing the trust of news audiences.

The challenge for the industry isn’t to abandon print for digital, nor to artificially sustain the print-led way of telling stories. And it’s not about adopting a whole new set of tools, but about changing the way we think about telling and distributing stories in the 21st-century. That’s what we’re working to do with GetBulb. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel chart, we’re making it easier to adapt to the ways people expect to engage with data-led stories.

You can catch Oliver in Johnny Ryan’s session on startup selection.  He’ll be talking about our Irish Times Digital Challenge win, and about how our product works with tools designers already use, making it easy to turn data into headline news.

It’s not cheap to go to the movies. If you live in the western world, a couple of movie tickets and some snacks won’t leave you with much change out of a 50, no matter what currency you use. We know it’s bad, but if, like us, you really have to see a blockbuster with surround sound and a lap full of gout-inducing snacks, is it better for your wallet to have a plane ticket or a time machine?

How much are they earning, and where’s the best place to be? We were surprised to learn that Italy and Serbia are comparatively good places to be female journalists (if we remove the actual earnings factor), and that Russia’s journalist population is 80% female (but they earn only 80% of what their male counterparts do).

Journalism jobs as we once knew them are on the decline, but that doesn’t mean the industry is dying. And it’s a little melodramatic to put journalists on a list with door-to-door salesmen, desktop publishers, and post office clerks.

Just like Skyfall in general, the film’s infographics are attractive and sleek, but don’t quite stand up to closer inspection. In reality – as some of you sadly know – a computer hack isn’t distinguishable at first; why would someone trumpet its arrival onto your hard drive? It could be just your screen going dark or an avalanche of spam ads, both of which happen in Die Hard 4.0 aka Live Free or Die Hard. That’s a believable hack.

Skyfall’s infographics are different, and are strangely consistent with the character behind them. In other words they’re sleek, ostentatious and even a little vain.

Our infographic adventure begins when arch-villain Sylva (Javier Bardem) has been captured by MI6. This man has been responsible for hacking the British Secret Service’s IT department before, so you know that something’s going to kick off.

Sure enough, when gadget guru Q plugs a lead into Sylva’s confiscated laptop, this unwelcome image appears on Q’s desktop:

Source: http://bplusmovieblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/skyfall-1159.png

Those little dashes coalesce into a centre, symbolising some sort of attack, until:

Source: http://bplusmovieblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/skyfall-1160.png

They form swirling patterns in a circle. What do we think of when we see dots forming a circle like that? You’re way ahead of me, it’s a map, or more specifically, a globe, and that globe becomes:

Source: http://bplusmovieblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/skyfall-1177.png

The London Underground! That’s an image recognisable to just about anyone who’s seen a city map, and any Londoner as the Tube network, and probably to anyone who has ever seen anything, ever. Note the red lines look like a literal virus. Because in movieland, computer viruses look like organic viruses, and angry computers scream when they’re shut down (hey, it happened in Eagle Eye). But it still just looks like a futuristic, elegant animated map? If an infographic is a marriage of design and information, surely we’d be told that it’s a security breach?

Source: http://bplusmovieblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/skyfall-1183.png

Bingo! It’s a perfect example of storytelling through infographics (although not quite). And just as a final gloat for Silva’s escape, we get his calling card. Movie villains love calling cards, whether it’s a flooded house in Home Alone, a literal card from a Batman villain, or this thing that looks like a teenager’s first tattoo:

Source: http://bplusmovieblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/skyfall-1186.png

Hey, joke’s on you Silva, MI6 now has your fancy laptop. Don’t get us wrong, we loved Skyfall, but couldn’t they have tried a little harder with the graphics?

Hat tip to the B+ Movie blog, and its Ranking Bond series.

It worried everyone from entertainment lawyers to pop culture critics, for reasons ranging from self-promotion-inspired sour grapes to legitimate concerns about the quality of storytelling that might result from a fan-driven campaign. And we wondered if the whole funding pattern looked a little uneven, with a focus that too heavily privileged the already privileged. Last year, Amanda Palmer raised more than a million dollars after looking for $100k to complete her record, book, and tour. What’s with all the overkill? (But this also comes in the wake of a study showing that Kickstarter’s pledges may be slowing down.)

We worried a little if it meant that smaller projects might get crowded out by the big name stars. So we had a closer look at what gets funded, and the results surprised us.

We’re used to backing friends’ crowdfunded albums, films, and other audience-focused projects, so what we didn’t realise is that the projects that get the most funding are those in design  and games. In fact, if you look at the numbers, design and games are particularly likely to end up overshooting their funding targets.

But then last week, a Maryland third-grader wanted to raise $829 to prove to her older brothers that girls could make games. At this moment, tiny fashionista and our new hero, Mackenzie Wilson, has raised more than $22,000. She said that she’d been inspired by the success of the Veronica Mars campaign. And in any case, we learned that it’s projects like Kenzie’s that get the most funding. Maybe we were a little too quick to judge.

Since I started writing this post, the Veronica Mars movie is  up to $4,252,035. Is it because I’m slow or because it’s hot?

Instead of our two cents about games as valid forms of popular culture, we thought we’d show you the hard sums.

Our opinions matter a heck of a lot less than this fact: Assassin’s Creed has taken in more money than the entire Lady Gaga franchise combined. That’s right, The Assassin’s Creed franchise is bigger than the whole empire of one of the world’s biggest pop stars.  Sorry, Gaga, the data was just born this way. If it’s any consolation, we’re not sure we’d even want a whiff of Assassin’s Creed 3, the fragrance. OK, maybe a whiff. But we probably wouldn’t spray it on our wrists in the airport duty-free.

Thanks to our friend Joe Griffin and our infographics whiz Aimee Stewart for this, the first of our Data Don’t Lie series, designed to show you the counterintuitive stories that help pedants win arguments.

Don’t ragequit, Gaga, you’re still special!

If you’re an analyst click here or if you’re a designer click here  to find out more.

In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution brought a rush toward cities. This meant overpopulation and a strain on the city’s infrastructure. Disease was rife, and sanitation was beyond poor. Life expectancy for urban dwellers plummeted. You could die from typhus-infected lice, or you could get cholera, which arrived from Asia in 1831.

If you were lucky enough to live, London stunk. It stunk like fifteen festival toilets, multiplied by the inside of twenty-five teenage bedrooms. But mostly, if you lived in a city, you were probably worried about death, and not just if you were poor.

And death came. At the end of August, 1854, a cholera outbreak hit Soho. Hundreds of people died in just ten days. It hit people of all classes, from the comfortable to the desperate. Physician John Snow, a medical reformer (he also helped develop anaesthesia, by the way, so we can thank him twice), was determined to stop the outbreak. It wasn’t his intention to create a map, but to collect data about where the deaths were occurring.

Snow’s map, which showed the proximity of those deaths to a single well in Soho, led to the shutting down of the contaminated water source, and a stop to the outbreak. The Guardian Datablog recently used modern mapping tools to show the dramatic impact of the contaminated Broad Street well, based on this original version.

Snow was already a proponent of germ theory, which was the growing alternative to the miasma theory of infection, whose supporters argued that disease could be transmitted through bad smells.

The map is often credited with being the great solution to a big mystery, and the beginning of modern epidemiology, but the two theories were already in hot competition around scientific circles. Snow already had an idea of the story he wanted to tell, but the graphical representation of that story is what provided the insight that finally convinced the authorities to take action. We think that goes even further toward demonstrating the power of an infographic.

Imagine that? A story told with data saved thousands of people from a rapid, disgusting, agonising death.

If you’re looking for me over the weekend, there’s a good chance I’ll be drinking something fermented, distilled or brewed (it kills bacteria, natch) in honour of a fellow infographics nerd whose insights led to life-saving action.

If only all of our lightulb moments had such an impact.

This is a chance for StartupBootcamp graduates to meet and network, get feedback, and pitch to investors. We’re looking forward to being part of it.

It’s been an intense couple of months, and we’re grateful for the feedback we’ve been getting from our users, a community as passionate about visual communication as we are.

If you’re a designer who makes infographics, we want to hear more about what you want to see in your infographics software. If you use infographics — or you’d like to — in reports, presentations, or in journalism or other media, we want to hear from you.

We’re developing a product that’s designed and built to meet your needs, so please get in touch with GetBulb or sign up to register your interest when we’re ready to launch.

Other GetBulb News

Since the start of the year, I’ve joined Team GetBulb as a content strategist. It’s rare that I’d end up in a role that would tap into as much of my experience as GetBulb does, or with a company that I think has so much potential.

Working with startups means getting my hands nice and dirty: you never do just the job you’re brought in to do, and I like that. But I feel especially emotionally invested in GetBulb because I love infographics and data visualisation.

My original training is in archaeology, which means that I was trained to use data about the material world to tell stories about human behaviour. My area of PhD research was in how the development of what I called a “cartographic consciousness” in the Renaissance had a huge impact on how people interacted with one another. I looked at how maps of sometimes notional landscapes were used to exert power over people in real ones.

There was something about the transformative power of representing a landscape on a piece of paper or vellum that held my interest for long enough to pursue a PhD in it. (Just not enough to finish it.)

Whenever I’d tell people that I worked with manuscript maps, the response was the same: “I love maps!” What is it about a visual abstraction of real-world data that makes people get all hot under the collar?

I never did figure it out, but while my patience for academia certainly wore me down, the excitement of holding a 400-year-old battle map in my hands never did wear off. And I still get a powerful kick out of a good information visualisation, whether it’s a 14th-century portolan chart, or this chart by David McCandless on How We Die.

In the age of Big Data, we’re in a new renaissance for dataviz, and I’m pretty damn excited to be part of a company that’s ready to make the most of it.

(Now, if someone could keep me out of Rough Trade, and prevent me from buying any more vintage coats on Brick Lane, that would be exceedingly helpful.)

Information visualisation pioneer Edward Tufte insists that “the only thing worse than a pie chart is several of them”. We’d argue that the only thing worse is a 3-D split pie chart. Especially if you use them for the wrong type of data.

But as any reputable dietician or statistician would tell you, pie can be a perfectly healthy part of a balanced (information) diet, just don’t go overboard. So what exactly is wrong with the humble pie chart?

Sort of nothing, but also sort of everything.

1. Pie charts can be easily overstuffed

The human eye isn’t great at estimating area. The more slices of pie you have, the less meaningful the visualisation is because the viewer’s eye is too busy trying to work out the relative size of each piece. By the time they’re done with that, if you haven’t told them anything new, you’ve just given their brains busywork with no payoff. And nobody likes busywork.

If you’ve created more than a few categories, or if you have a number of them that are similar in size, that’s when you’re in trouble.

If you’ve got a limited number of categories that are significantly varied in size, then a pie chart isn’t the worst thing you can use, especially if they show values either slightly above or slightly below 25%.

When you might use a pie chart

2. They can be great at telling jokes, but they don’t help your data tell a story

A great infographic has a narrative, and it gives you insights you can’t get from the numbers alone. Having the data displayed with symbols or icons helps a reader process and retain the information. Giving the data a context makes it memorable. The time it takes to read and understand the elements is actually enjoyable. It’s a story, so it has a payoff that your reader should appreciate.

The reason a pie chart can work can well as a joke is that it’s inherently a non sequitur. Good for internet memes, not so good for convincing colleagues you need to take action on something. But it doesn’t take much to add even a dash of story. You can use something a bit like a pie chart and make a much bigger impression.

When Florence Nightingale wanted to convince her superiors that disease was as formidable an enemy as any human army, she used a rose graph or coxcomb that became iconic enough to bear her name, and led to improved sanitary conditions for soldiers.

Source: http://www.royal.gov.uk/output/Page3943.asp

But where you have story, you have a lot more room to manipulate that narrative. Because Florence Nightingale manipulated her data. She made the blue areas around the edge appear to be more dramatic than they actually were .

Infographics, like all stories, are selective about what they use and how they interpret, and that leaves them open to being fudged.

3. Pie charts are boring

We often think we just want the naked facts, but we need a language, a syntax, and an emotional connection to the information in order to relate to it. Sure, we’re wary of the ability to lie with statistics (especially if it doesn’t result in fewer people dying of awful diseases) but a pie chart is mostly another way of looking at your Excel spreadsheet. And most of us are savvier than to swallow stats uncritically.

And we don’t mean to be snobs, but a pie chart on its own is ugly. Given how much we love data, doesn’t it deserve to be presented beautifully?

A pie chart doesn’t have the versatility or wit to visualise the death toll in Quentin Tarantino’s films nor show, in lovely gorey detail, how those splattery, burny, explodey, slashy deaths occurred. A lone percentage isn’t half as stimulating as seeing the facts, multi-layered and dripping in blood, jump off the screen.

If you’re hung up on these old-school, not-that-exciting visualisations, by all means, go ahead and use them. Every good visual communicator knows that they have their place. But with what’s available to collect and represent data in the 21st century, why limit yourself to something as flat as a pie chart, unless that’s all you need to show?