Thank goodness I found some time to do some more infographics! This is one of the episodes that first inspired me to start making graphics based on each program. This episode shows what This American Life is best out- telling some really great stories while relating it to the big picture, as well as including some great statistics.
Woops! Sorry for the misplaced Penn State and University of Mississippi labels in that previous version, they’ve since been fixed.
I’ve been working on all sorts of infographics all week. One piece I did for a client had to do with the U.S. unemployment rate, so I was naturally curious about how that would relate to holiday purchases. I’d heard that people were spending less, but I wondered how much it had to do with the unemployment rate. When charted out, there is a noticeable ebb and flow to the holiday sales increases.
Had a lot of fun working on this one. Isn’t it nice when an episode makes it easy to think of datapoints? I’m glad to have garnered some interest of some excellent designers, so look out for some other people’s work on here in weeks to come. Again, if you are interested in contributing, just send me an email and we can talk it over.
Today I was wondering about whether there is maybe a Processing sketch that I could feed the This American Life audio file and it would spit out a 900px waveform to add to the bottom of of these posts. I’m not too good with that kind of thing, but if you are & have suggestions, I’d love to hear from you in the comments or by email.
Thank you everyone who sends kind words about the project. I guess I’m going to actually do this thing, then. If you are a designer who would like to do a guest graphic for one of the upcoming episodes, just send me an email and we can talk it over. I’d love to see other people’s takes on the info.
Here’s the infographic for the third episode of This American Life. The first episode of what would become a tradition: the poultry slam.
I am having trouble expressing how awed and grateful I am to get a link from ThisAmericanLife.com – I never expected such a thing when I first posted a link to this project on my Twitter yesterday. As I navigated to ThisAmericanLife.com I noticed “Infographical Companions” on the homepage and thought that somebody had beat me to the idea!
If you have any suggestions as to how things should be done around here… angles I should look at, techniques I should use, or any other suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments. I am using this blog to learn and I welcome any and all criticism. I am doing my best to make something worthwhile for myself and others, so getting pointed in the right direction is helpful. Thank you for checking out my site, I hope that you’ll like it.
Today I listened to Episode 2. It’s funny how current this whole program sounds, everything seeming perfectly natural as “the recession” and it’s effects were mentioned. While listening to the segment on the hacker/phreaker/phishers I wondered about what kind of internet crimes are committed nowadays, so I found some data on that. I also found poet Michael Warr’s description of his schedule as a Jehovah’s Witness very interesting.
It was harder to create an infographic for this one than the first one. It was less about concrete concepts on which data can be dug up, and more about thinking philosophically about good and bad, which is certainly hard to quantify.
While doing the research I found this interesting summary of cybercrime cases (at justice.gov). The summaries are simple and eloquent and tell very interesting little stories. Such as Website designer redirected Aljazeera.net web traffic, FAA control tower disabled, and simply Member of hacking group “The Deceptive Duo”.
My new years resolution is to make an infographic on every This American Life ever made. The idea is to expand and add context to the stories and information contained in the shows. Basically, anything I am curious about while listening to the pieces.
Today I started at the beginning, the first episode of This American Life, back when it was called “Your Radio Playhouse”. In this episode, one of the characters is an innocent musician who had been wrongfully imprisoned for 20 years because of a witness who later recanted their testimony. This made me wonder about the number of people who have been released after serving crimes they did not commit. Which is how I came to find this data from the Innocence Project.