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Should Data.gov visualize?

April 24th, 2009 Randall Hand

The US government has stood up a rather extensive data portal at Data.gov, and it seems logical that they should begin to display automatically generated and interactive visualizations of the data, right? Well, over at SunLight Labs they think that they shouldn’t.

The second reason why government should avoid spending time on adding visualizations or other bells and whistles to Data.gov is because it actually hurts transparency. Visualizations, like any other form of news product, can be editorial– even inadvertently. If government puts more of a priority on producing great visualizations and user experience than on providing quality accurate data with a great feedback loop, then it runs a pretty good chance of not adhering to the goal of being actually transparent.

Personally, I disagree with their assessment. They also make an argument that by making the data public, the community can create their own visualization which will undoubtedly be better than whatever the government would publicize, which is probably correct. However, I really believe that non-biased visualizations could be created and shown with moderate effort.

via Sunlight Labs: Blog – Should Data.gov visualize? Probably not..

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.

Science data, government

http://vatul.net/blog/ Maitri
Data.gov should remain as pure data. How it is interpreted, i.e. visualization, is up to the end user. There is no such thing as unbiased when it comes to the government, and people should not be led to think that those visualizations are indeed raw data.
Actinolite
They will likely have their hands quite full simply trying to start this data flowing. Once it does, it will become a raging torrent of data, requiring constant updates to the structure, format, and infrastructure. Spending time on visualization that is probably better done by third parties will only take away from their primary goal of providing the data.
http://vatul.net/blog/ Maitri
@Actinolite Agreed. There is a huge risk of data.gov (and recovery.gov) becoming huge, unparsable data dumps. But, again, what is logical structure, format, etc.? Whose logic and structure? How data is organized often determines how it is ultimately interpreted.
Also, the third parties are already on it.
http://blog.wkraemer.com Wayne
On my “Data & Design” blog, I’ve discussed why I have to agree with Sunlight Labs. The turning of what is supposed to be transparency into propaganda not only is politically dangerous, but also stands a chance of beginning to delegitimize all visualization of data.
http://www.sas.com Selkie@SAS
Visualizing data, whatever the source or nature of the data, will always promote the idea of transparency. It provides a commonly agreed upon definition of what it is we are looking at, thus making it accessible – at last – to everyone. A welcome leap forward, I’d say.