Celebrating 50 Years of Four Corners

The veteran investigative journalism unit of the ABC, Four Corners, turned 50 on 19th August 2011, and presented an ideal opportunity to resurface from the archives the history, stories and insights of a half century’s current affairs in Australia.

Eighty full programs are available to watch online or in situ at the exhibition, via touchscreen. These are accompanied by over 70 additional interviews and decade compiles in the exhibition space.

The touchscreen used is a mid-range PC designed for home use, and runs a Flex-authored Adobe AIR application that presents the content. 

The AVE Editor was adapted to cater for the specific IA and asset structure of the presentation.

Online and accessible to portable devices, the Four Corners 50 Years website delivers standout programs from five decades.

The physical exhibition is now open and runs to November 25th, at ABC Ultimo Centre, 700 Harris Street, NSW 2007.

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Marshall McLuhan: A Centenary in Media

The McLuhan Project, launched by ABC Radio National, was a major series of broadcasts on ABC Radio National and on ABC Digital Radio during the week of a significant centenary.

The series was accompanied by a timeline of the centenary years, detailing notable events in McLuhan’s life as well as the world at large.

The project was assembled in the AVE Editor, as described “An Editor for Visualising Time and Events”.

The result is a web object that is a fairly expert primer on McLuhan and his impact on digital literacy. The overall content scheme of the presentation agregates original entries with the broader web of Wikipedia, YouTube, Universities, etc.

Visit the McLuhan Project at ABC Radio National. Scroll down the page for the timeline (you have to launch it).

Sam Doust

An Editor for Visualising Time and Events

One of the most common forms of explaining complex issues, data and events on the web is the format of the chronology, also known as the timeline. Information often from multiple sources and points of view is aggregated to build context and represent what happened over time. In principal, this is a very usable format for examining a complex issue and can create a common understanding of a series of events.

The issue is how best to do that - what visual representations of time and events works best?

Back in 2009, I saw the brilliant visualisation Here and There by Schulze and Webb. In brief, what their visualisation did was to pick up the horizon in two images of Manhattan Island and lift it to the top of the image, making it horizonless. What this does is enable one to simultaneously see where one is standing in the immediate context of the image (e.g. the intersection of East 34th St and 3rd Avenue), as well as the rest of the island, due SxSW to One New York Plaza.

Heare and There - Visualisation of Manhattan

Saul Steiberg’s classic 1976 New Yorker cover renders a similar perspective, entitled “The World As Seen From New York’s 9th Avenue.” And there are many other isometric perspectives that sort of do the same thing.

New Yorker - cover,1976

What fascinated me about Here and There in 2009 was the strong feeling of connection between “where I was” and “where I was going” - What would that simultaneous visual experience bring to the visualisation of chronologies, timelines, etc? Well, something like this:

A Journey through Climate History

Just before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change in December 2009, we were engaged in a giant alternate reality drama project, called Bluebird AR. One aspect of this project was to craft explainer content that could bring better understanding to the very complex issues around climate science. With so much contention at the time, we wanted to produce content that would lay down some of the basics of climate history. So we produced a chronology of key climatic events across the  4.5 billion year history of planet Earth, and we did so on a “road” that allows you to see time stretch away from you.

Moving through epochs, one travels along this horizonless road back through time from the eve of the Copenhagen Summit in December 2009, through what some call the Anthropegenic period of history (where humans have directly influenced the climate) and eventually through to deep time. We were so busy at the time that we couldn’t template this approach, but made a plan to get to do it.

Late in 2010, on a vist to the online department of The Guardian Newspaper, I showed a group of their producers, developers and designers this approach to representing timelines of events and they have subsequently gone on to use the idea to visualise the rapid and concurrent events in the Middle East in the beginning of 2011.

Guardian interactive, the Arab Spring

And since September last year, we’ve been able to get back to templating our approach by working on a Visualisation Editor, which allows for different visualisations to arise from a central database of entries, called events.

To these events can be attributed all sorts of media - text, video, audio, pictures. Additionally each individual event can be tagged, grouped and categorised, allowing for a rich metadata and taxonomy to the information.

Visualisation Editor interface

This editor allows a single individual to create visually immersive timelines without any additional help from developers or designers, which is of great importance in a broadcast environment. Having previously developed visualisations based on card arrays and ‘roads,’ these became the first visualisations that can presently be published out of the editor.

An example of the card view:

50 Years of Human Spaceflight

Crucially, the system allows the author to continually add context and republish the content, so that its currency and context can remain intact through time.

ABC News: Rebuilding the Block

Events can be represented in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years so that one can produce a chronology of events surrounding the widest possible range of events in time and space, from a single gunshot to the flight of a space probe, or the evolution of a species.

Timeline Editor in use: 2010 Year in Review

Here’s a basic (unstyled) Road layout, detailing events in the first two weeks following the earhquake/tsunami disaster in Japan:

Unstyled view of the Road layout

This following image shows the lightbox view when an event on the road is selected. Note video, images, text, resource links and tags are aggregated around the event, which is also able to be grouped and categorised:

Lightbox open on the road

And because events do not have to be dependent on time in a linear sense, the editor can also visualise content as a page layout or another sequential context, like a storyboard.

The next visualisation we’ll be making for the editor will be a true-3D space emphasising the relationships between events (via tags, groups and categories of data).

If you’re interested in the development or use of the ABC Visualisation Editor, please get in touch: explainerproject@gmail.com.

_Sam Doust

Digital Citizens - technology explained

Today we published a website aimed at explaining the basics of the digital world. Overarching concepts such as podcasting, social media, mobile and portable devices, digital televison and the brief history of the digital revolution are explained alongside individual technologies and devices, both in video and short article formats.

The site is especially aimed at more traditional ABC audience members and others who may not feel comfortable with engaging with ABC content output to newer, digital platforms.

This was an idea orginally brought to our group from an Executive Producer in Radio Promos and has been created by a small, traditional unit of producer, information architect, developer, designer, creative director/scriptwriter.

Digital Citizens Frontpage

Source: abc.net.au

How to get out of Guantanamo

Shows the interactive layout

This interactive illustrates the complex legal framework involved in processing inmates at Guantanamo. Military tribunals, federal court cases, habeas corpus petitions, a change in Administration, prisoner dispositions and deaths… 779 went in, 172 remain. Discover what’s happened to them all since the first intake in 2002.

The explainer was built to compliment an ABC Radio National program on why President Barack Obama has found it so difficult to fulfill a promise to close the Cuba-based prison. You can listen or download the program here. We spoke to the producer, Keri Phillips a couple of weeks out from her deadline and it was clear from her research and our fledgling investigations on the subject that nowhere online, either from US Government, NGO or other independent sources, was there a consolidated appraisal that quantified the way that the 779 prisoners had passed through the system - and how.

The graphic, stepped interface depicts a maze-like prison environment, with the information partitioned into information sequences and links to primary sources. IN this visually evocative context, the complex story can be taken step by step, and it becomes clear how complex the nearly decade old prison system has been.

We developed the presentation in Flash instead of ‘HTML5’, because of time constraints. A PDF version of the text and linked resources for non-Flash browsers is also available.

_Sam Doust

Source: abc.net.au

WikiLeaks Interviews

We decided to produce a video context-building template in response to the fascinating documentary by ABC Four Corners on the story of Bradley Manning, The Forgotten Man, first broadcast on 14 Feb 2011.

The assembled cast for the documentary featured a who’s who of the broader WikiLeaks story, including Julian Assange, David House, Dean Baquet, Alan Rusbridger, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Adrian Lamo, Kevin Poulsen and even Daniel Ellsberg.

Each had much to say in extended interviews, recorded as raw material for the documentary that built important context around the complex story of WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning.

This Flash-based interactive template allows for as many squares of content as required, each opening out to unique (in this case) video components.

The logical step was to make this Flash object embeddable on any web page, anywhere. This helps aggreagte the story and extend its context, whilst sharing meaningful content in the public domain.

To embed this video grid, simply cut and paste the following code into your web page:

<object height=”700” width=”700”><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/MediaGrid.swf”></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/MediaGrid.swf” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”700” height=”700”></embed></object>

You can change the size of the object by tweaking the two sets of height and width references (currently set at 700).

_Sam Doust

Source: abc.net.au

Castaway Kids - journey by map

This explainer was designed to accompany ‘Castaway Kids’, an in-depth feature about the detention of unaccompanied minors and families entering Australia as refugees.

Castaway Kids

It traces the journey of Najeeba, a young Afghani refugee. From leaving her home in Bamiyan, through the various means by which she arrived with her family in Australia, the explainer was designed to illustrate the various stages of that journey alongside a video account given by Najeeba of her experiences;  an understanding of the scale of her journey would give context to her story.

The stages of Najeeba’s journey were drawn from her oral account and sketched on a map, then broken down into sections that could be clicked through, these were then matched to segments of video from her interview. The Map itself was treated in such a way that only the information relevant to her story was presented. A key was provided for mode of travel (air, road, sea), and a time scale provided so it was immediately clear how long each stage of her journey took - these stages were colour coded for quick recognition.

This project required a standard team of IA/Designer/HTML developer and producer. Video content was provided by the news team responsible for the feature. It was built in ‘HTML5’ to be accessible through iOS and was completed over a 2 week period, with the majority of the time spent on mapping the stages of Najeeba’s journey.

_Astrid Scott

What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding us and sustaining us. Our sensory organs are limited: They evolved for reasons of survival, not for depicting the enormous wealth and richness of reality in all its unfathomable depth. Therefore, the ongoing process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality.
Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel

Geoengineering Explained

As part of the alternate reality drama, Bluebird AR, a great deal of research went into ensuring the veracity of the science of both global warming and specifically geoengineering was maintained throughout all aspects of the production.

As well as consulting and interviewing leading geoeingineering experts including Ken Caldeira, David Keith, Peter Cox, Jamais Cascio, Bjorn Lomborg and others, our production team created assets that explained the complexities of the subject.

Alongside this dossier, which gives an excellent high level presentation of the issues at play, we also produced an exhaustive delicious index, Google Earth layers, and produced the first major audio debate on the subject after the 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change.

These all sat alongside a host of other assets that helped the audience engage and understand the complexities of the subject.

Best viewed in full screen mode which is found in the menu option, bottom left.

_Sam Doust

Source: abc.net.au

Beating the Odds - data visualisation

Beating the odds

This Flash interactive graphic was created for an ABC news online special investigation into children who live in one of the most disadvantaged areas in Australia. Prompted by the disappearance of a 6 year old from the area, ‘Beating the odds’ was an in depth look at Mt Druitt in Western Sydney and why children there might be at risk of neglect, abuse and social exclusion.

The graphic was intended to give a statistical background to the report, showing data for factors likely to increase the risk of ‘social exclusion’ for children. High levels of unemployment, crime, housing stress, public housing and single parent families are all indicators pointing to increased risk.

Beating the odds interactive

We obtained datasets related to each of these risk factors from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and NSW Recorded Crime Statistics 2005 - 2009. These datasets revealed that there were higher levels of each of these risk factors in Mt Druitt when compared to other Statistical Local Areas (SLAs) of Sydney, and Greater Sydney as a whole, so we decided to show a spectrum of areas across east and western Sydney. As location is directly relevant to the datasets, we decided to present the information on a map of Greater Sydney, which also helps illustrate broader geographic trends.

Each area displaying a dataset was also graded for child social exclusion risk as assessed by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling in 2006. This was illustrated by shading, so as not to confuse the other datasets.

The challenge of displaying multiple comparative percentages in a limited area was handled slightly differently across each risk factor but in each instance the data is pulled into the graphic dynamically resulting in an accurate visualisation of the dataset.

Built in Flash, the graphic was created by an IA/designer/developer team with a producer. The project took about 2 weeks to complete, the bulk of this time was spent in sourcing and analysing the data.

_Astrid Scott