We are in a period of data-rush. Getting information is banal. Data is gathered, processed, and available anywhere, anytime. It can be very useful or very annoying, but finding the time, capacity, and tools for making sense out of the data-for the moment as well as the foreseeable future-is the real challenge. That is why I so very much appreciate the work of dedicated professionals like journalists and editors. Or a new kind of professional that The Economist described in a special report entitled ‘Data, data everywhere’ in February 2010 as 'the data scientist, … [who] combines the skills of software programmer, statistician, and storyteller, [working as an] artist to extract the nuggets of gold hidden in mountains of data.' I praise these authors, curators, and designers who make the effort of turning information into an experience for me as the reader.
What inspires me the most right now is the field of data visualization, information graphics, and visual storytelling as it can be found in publications such as the Italian supplement IL. A new breed of data journalist is passionately working to find appropriate, understandable, and entertaining visual representations for complex datasets or processes. Having said that, I feel that-despite the popularity of the phrase 'a picture is worth a thousand words'-visuals are not always understandable and easy to read. We are challenged to develop more sophisticated visual literacy across society, and those currently working in information graphics are helping to do just that. They clearly intend to prevent data graphics from being merely a short-lived design trend. Today's designers, including Nicholas Felton, who became known for publishing personal data in the form of an annual Feltron Report, are closely reading, examining, and discussing the quality of a visual in addition to the quality and story of the data behind it (for example, in Felton's case, those in acclaimed designer Jonathan Barnbrook’s The Little Book of Shocking Global Facts). And many other designers are also contributing to this critical discourse.
Beyond the individual story, the joy of dealing with information is the experience one has with different types of media. I am happy to see how some media outlets keep experimenting to make the best possible use of different channels. Glamorous titles such as Monocle as well as smaller ventures such as the online feuilleton Berliner Gazette are using print, web, mobile, audio, motion, events, exhibitions, et cetera to extend a story rather than just duplicating it over and over again.
What I feel is still missing, though, are the right tools for me to handle my data. Getting data is easy, but selecting, storing, indexing, updating, and most importantly contextualizing the information is rather difficult. What is the opposite of Google, the smart output device? Maybe the range of upcoming online curation tools like Storify might offer a solution, but will the amount of time I need to invest in working with these tools ever pay off?
In the meantime I keep struggling, exploring, enjoying other tools and outlets, while always being happy to come back to proven and trustworthy sources. One of the most powerful promises in media sits right at the top left of the New York Times-the printed paper, that is. It reads 'All the News That‘s Fit to Print’. Nothing more, nothing less. Carefully selected, condensed. In comparison to that, most blogs are just weapons of mass distraction.
Sven Ehmann is Creative Director at Die Gestalten Verlag.
15. Reading Beyond Words – Martin Ferro-Thomsen
My literature professor understood reading as a relative concept: One might grasp the words without yet comprehending the meaning. Ideally the reader would discard her library every five years, because by then she had elevated her perspective…
That’s an elitist notion of reading in stark contrast to the reality of today. Text as a medium is being challenged by ever more engaging forms of communication. And it seems the conditions for deep reading are pretty much being killed by mankind’s ongoing experiment to digitize society. Irony, anyone?
Me, I’ve parted with most of my print library. For good. Ninety percent of my reading now takes place on-screen, although I’m uneasy about digital books living inside those intangible walled gardens. Can I pass them on to my kids, like my mother did with Camus to me? Will they keep my side notes? Will they smell?
Let’s not get overly nostalgic just yet. Text remains a universal vehicle for human thought and often it’s the shortest distance from one mind to another. But as we stumble into digital renaissance, our understanding of both text and reading will have to encompass more than mere words: hyper-connectedness, vibrant plasticity, social interaction, and dynamic contextuality.
Martin Ferro-Thomsen, M.A. is co-founder of Issuu, a leading digital publishing platform.
16. We Left Home; Why Shouldn’t Ideas? – Jeff Gomez
A hundred years ago books were pale shut-ins, escaping overstuffed shelves only sparingly; maybe one or two volumes at a time but never en masse. Libraries were huge, shy, lumbering things; as big as a herd of elephants (and just as portable). But today, with the advent of eBooks and devices such as the Kindle and iPad, we have the potential to carry around with us at all times our entire book collections in a digitized format. Whether or not this is a threat to publishers or bookstores (or even to writers) is beyond the point. Let us, for a moment, consider what this means to readers.
Since the invention of print there has never been a back pocket or book bag large enough to fit a bookshelf full of books (let alone an entire library), and yet now all of that text can live inside a tiny gadget. Our various portable screens then become portals to limitless knowledge, imagination, or anything we want them to be. Stories, novels, entire worlds are at our fingertips. And books, for centuries shackled to the shelf (sometimes literally), are turned from static, bound, physical objects to caged birds finally allowed to take flight.
Jeff Gomez is author of the book Print is Dead: Books in our Digital Age.
17. Delectation – Denise Gonzales Crisp
‘Type well used is invisible as type’, wrote Beatrice Warde in the early 1930s. Like a clear glass goblet, a crystalline window, and a perfect speaking voice, transparent typography is the 'unnoticed vehicle' for 'the transmission of ideas'.
Text sputtered onto screens in alien bitmap types some fifty years later. The jagged forms were as exotic and present as lugubrious calligraphy inked by medieval scribes.
Current high definition screens deliver typography comparable to, if not more refined than, early twentieth-century printing, with conspicuous additions: animation, scalability, variability. Wilful visuality. Human voice, too, translates written text to palpable form in audio 'books', an unwitting feat of reverse engineering that recalls oral traditions. Ears read words filtered by elocution.
Reading is, and was always, mediated by form, contained by technology. Heavier at times, and lighter. As legacies instruct we read in four full dimensions using at least three senses (the sixth is not considered here). Touch fingertips to raised dots. Click to advance. See words appearing, and disappearing. Turn the page. Warde eschewed 'delectation of the senses' where reading is concerned. Impossible.
Denise Gonzales Crisp is a designer, writer, and Graphic Design professor at North Carolina State University , College of Design .
18. Welcome to the Digital Age. What Changed? – Alexander Griekspoor
Scientists read a lot. In fact the entire academic ‘workflow’ is based on publishing papers, a drive that acts as both the final goal and the starting point of research, and also fuels the massive industry of academic journals. Interestingly, more and more of these journals no longer print articles on paper but distribute them as digital PDFs, a transition dating to 1998 that became the standard in the following years, right around the time I was doing my PhD. Back then I still copied physical journals as poor quality black and white pages to read at home or on the way to school.