#data overload

The Forest vs. The City – A Graphic Short Story According to my notes, I first wrote the story A Hundred Ways to Die on May 14, 1996. At the time, I was living at Rolling Ridge—a 1,500-acre expanse of wilderness in West Virginia, about two hours from Washington, D.C. The area was under constant pressure from developers, especially Dan Ryan Homes, eager to push new subdivisions up against the…

*strokes invisible beard*

Storytelling In A Data-Driven, Cross-Device Era

A Touch Of Whimsy – IT or DT?

I am back from Benares and Allahabad, and I have gone straight into the zone of being completely disorganized. I managed to download my photos, and categorise them in to where and when I took them. I do not think that I took too many pictures – about 2,000. But, I don’t feel like looking at them this week.

However, I have an idea for a post, based on the last two pictures that I took at…

This week in one of my tech writing classes, the reading was from a book called Information Anxiety 2 by Richard Wurman. From my understanding so far, the main idea of the book is that while we do have access to a great deal of data, in many cases, it is impossible to even begin to comprehend it and process it into information that we can actually use. 

For example, let's take a made up statistic: There are 40 billion plastic bags floating in the Pacific Ocean right now. Sounds pretty dreadful, right? (Actually, there is an island of plastic out there, but I have no idea how many plastic bags actually make it up.) The problem here is that we don't really know what this 40 billion number means. We could try to visualize it, we could try to take photos of the plastic island and post them on an activist forum, we could take a look at the harmful effects it has on the environment, but in the long run, it's impossible to fathom the number 40 billion. That's 40,000,000,000. That visualization means nothing. It's simply a 4 with a bunch of zeroes behind it. We might as well be saying that there are a lot of plastic bags floating in the Pacific Ocean, it says the same thing. But what is a lot? Is a lot a few dozen? A few hundred? 

The primary issue here is that the average person has nothing to compare 40 billion to. We don't have 40 billion dollars, we can't count that many grains of sand or stars. We can try. We can try really hard, but because the way we measure things is arbitrary and based on the measurement of other things, we'll never truly be able to understand 40 billion. 

And that's okay. No one truly expects you to understand it because they can't understand it either. 

It's like going to a library. You'll never know everything the library has to tell, despite your best efforts at reading it all. You'll never be able to understand everything they have to offer, but you can understand small pockets. That's perfectly fine because it's how we end up with professionals and specialists!