Wait, don't run! I know the phrase "data visualization" sounds unpromising, but it's actually pretty cool. See for yourself at the blog Flowing Data, which has a post dedicated to the top five data visualization projects of 2008. Among the winners, a Radiohead video based on laser scans, a New York Times graphic on how voting broke between Obama and Clinton during the Democratic primaries (below, in miniature), "streamgraphs" of movie ticket sales and more. Some are still, some are video.

I noticed this because many of the examples they use are from newspapers or magazines using graphics to make complex data more interesting and accessible for readers like your correspondent, who's grasp of statistics is tenuous at best. The media love using visualizations because raw data is generally boring and difficult for non-specialists to interpret. But it is also often the heart of a story. So vizualizations are a tool more making it easier to communicate the meaning or scope of complex data to a broad audience. (A previous example on Imagethief was this video vizualizing 24 hours worth of global air traffic in just over a minute.)

PR people are in the communication business. So why don't PR people use it more? Surely some of our clients have interesting stories to tell based around dense data or information. We should ship a bunch of spreadsheets or CSVs to our media contacts and let them do the work. Or perhaps we could invest a little energy and find ways to develop our own visualizations and use them to help tell our clients stories. I don't know about you, but in my PR career I've not run across this...ever.

Just a thought. Check out the site.

Vizualize this: Radiohead's "House of Cards".