I spent a few hours in the Alexandria Hospital emergency room this past Friday night with my 11 year old Alex, to get a gash on his head (soccer accident) stitched up. Hot night on the town!

When we met with the triage nurse, he asked Alex to show him how painful the cut was pointing to the pain scale pictured here - which was taped to the nurse's desk. Alex did not hesitate a second - pointing to the scale and saying it now felt about like a "3". The nurse then asked him how badly it hurt when it happended, and Alex thought a half-second and said "about a 6 or 7".

I found it interesting how quickly Alex answered - for him the visual scale was very intutitive. (Maybe this is typical of the Game-Cube generation?!)

But it reminded me of how powerful are images to convey information (a well established topic, I know), how infrequently (or poorly) images are used to convey information about public policy issues.

It's easy to generate graphs from data using something like Excel and post it online, but it is not always done well. Not to pick on anyone - but this graphic on passport/birth certificate rates by our friends at the esteemed Center on Budget and Policy Priorities I find hard to understand. It has a lot of information, maybe too much, does not help me to understand how to interpret the information, and does not show me what CBPP sees as important about it. Maybe I am slow, but I had to look at it several times to understand what the color coding signified, what the relative range of the bars meant, what where the lessons from it. It might just as well have been a data chart?



A compelling example of a graphic is this one about smoking and other health risks - done up in a memorable way. You get the point - at a glance.


Online maps can convey a lot of data, and the emergence of the open-API Google maps should have policy wonks everywhere going crazy with it. Not sure I've seen that - but I like this mashup of Colorado schools test scores with Google maps. The color coded stick pins and the pop up data charts make it easy to cruise the data.


Send along other examples and favorites!

Technorati tags:
Google Maps