Wednesday, February 08, 2012

While I am making a final sprint to finish the Income Guide, I wanted to try a beta test to see how difficult it would be to print copies of my data graphics and sell my work though my website. In the past I have tried Cafepress for printing and selling the large posters that I created for my Master Thesis but with very little success. These were large 2' x 3' posters and the digital print-on-demand was not a high quality. This time I will be selling a popular graph on Tax Rates that I recently updated for 2011. This tax graph is topical and has been reposted by many blogs and has been requested by financial advisors. It will be a small tabloid-sized poster on high quality paper but with digital printing so I can do short runs (i.e. 50 copies at a time). I am working with a print broker to experiment with different paper options and help me find the best printer in my budget. My hope is to create a high quality print piece since there is little incentive to buy and hang a cheaply made poster in your office if it is freely available online. I have also found an online shopping cart (Cart66) that can be set up on my Wordpress blog to start selling the poster. I am researching the best way to printing mailing labels and postage myself and the cost of different mailing options. Finally, I have set-up a form and an email list with Mailchimp to gather the emails of potential customers though me website. With this project, I can work out the kinks in the printing/online sales process before I publish my Illustrated Guide to Income.

Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Even with the holidays and travel I was able to give two presentations in December. The first was at a design lecture given each month in Brooklyn, NY, called Creative Mornings. I have attended this lecture series many times but this was my first time as a presenter. I was able to show to an audience of designers and developers the income-inequality graphics I presented at the Big Picture conference in October. The feedback was both positive and curious about what the data means. As I put the collection together it is clear that biggest hurdle in front of me is linking the graphics together to help people see the connections between them. 

The second was an informal "lunch talk" about the best practices in data visualization at the Congressional Budget Office in Washington, DC. I fielded a lot of questions afterwards from the 25-30 people who attended. There is movement within the CBO to create more infographics with their data, which I was happy to see. One of the goals for my project is to post more behind-the-graphic background information about the techniques for my data graphics since there is too much data for one person to tackle.

On a side note, one tip I would like to pass on if you have a Macintosh computer try experimenting with OmniGraphSketcher. There is a free trial. They don't have a lot of graph types but I like it for creating simple, clean graphs and diagrams.

Thursday, December 01, 2011

When I was an undergraduate in Economics I didn't received a lot (if any) introduction to historical data covering stock returns, interest rates, inflation much less the income, industry and occupation data that I am researching for my "Illustrated Guide to Income." I suspect that hasn't changed for today's students.

While journalists will write articles about unemployment based on a press release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unless the reader is very familiar with the statistics and what they measure, these numbers are out of context and not very meaningful. News organizations like the New York Times experiment with data graphics, but there is data at government web sites and in academic papers that is not tied to current events so doesn't get covered by the news. And the need for more and better data visualizations exists with lots of room for experimentation.

I consider my web site Visualizing Economics and “An Illustrated Guide to Income in the United States” to be my experiments in trying to bring clarity to economic data. I wanted to see if data graphics on their own can be used to explain a subject like income, instead of used just as supporting materials within a traditional storytelling format like a magazine article or embedded in a video.

I am not sure myself if the format I have chosen is going to work. But I know that the individual data graphics will be of interest to people, especially with the news coverage of Occupy Wall Street and the discussion it has created around income inequality in America.

Over the past few months I have created most of the data graphics I need to cover the topics of occupations, industries, education, country, race, gender and distribution. Recently, the Census has updated its income and poverty data series, which has given me a new set of income data with which to work. I hope to have all the data graphics finalized by the end of the year.

To that end, I have been researching different printers to print copies of the final version. However, the major question I am dealing with right now is the narrative of the guide. I have started with a very early draft to try out different organizations and approaches, looking for the best way to highlight the connections between each data graphic. I have also started to show this draft to a small number of people to see what reactions I get and what discussions are prompted from my work. This is in addition to the feedback I have been receiving from my Kickstarter backers on the early drafts of my designs.

While most of my statistics come from government websites, I have developed new data sources, such as the Economic Modeling Specialists, for their expertise with industry and occupation data. I also  rcently started a relationship with Statista, a statistics portal covering agriculture, finance, and politics. I met with a senior researcher with Congressional Budget Office to discuss its efforts to use and promote data visualization of economic data.

I sometimes think my biggest challenge is not finding the data but figuring out how to present the all of the data I have found.

In October, I gave a talk at The Big Picture conference in New York. I hope to have a video of that talk on my site soon. This December, I will be giving another talk at a monthly lecture called Creative Mornings in Brooklyn. Finally, this March I will be attending SXSW as one of its five 2012 Scholarship winners.

For future promotions of the guide I have collected nearly 6,500 subscribers from email, RSS Feeds, Facebook and Twitter, which continue to grow everyday. And when I am able to post my new income infographics, I will be able to leverage my connections with other websites (like the Huffington Post, which has posted my graphics in the past) to get out the word to a much larger audience.

All in all, while there have been some ups and downs, and times when I didn’t think I could get everything done, I feel the experience has been very rewarding, and I can't wait start posting my work on my site when it is finally done.

Tuesday, November 01, 2011

As I get closer to finishing my Illustrated Guide to Income, I am focusing more on the marketing and publicizing side of the business. This includes giving a presentation a few weeks ago to the financial community here in New York at The Big Picture conference. I was first on the schedule which meant I could relax during the rest of the conference. Also I had a chance to show my work and get feedback at the breaks from people who had not see it before.

In addition, I applied for and received a SxSW 2012 Scholarship which was created "to recognize individuals from all sectors and from anywhere in the world who are using new media to push the boundaries of tackling community problems". With a ticket to SxSW conference in Austin, TX next March, I hope to meet other people in the startup community tackling issues in the areas of journalism and data visualization.

Finally, with the Occupy Wall Street putting a spotlight on the unequal distribution of income, I posted a teaser to my web site, a new data graphic which looks at the Top 0.01% (not just the Top 1%). You can see it for yourself at VisualizingEconomics.com.

~Catherine

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Work on my Illustrated Guide to Income is continuing. As of today I have more than 35 pages completed. Though it sometimes feels like I am just running in place, it helps to take a look at my progress each week to remind myself how much I have accomplished.

Also, I am experimenting with Google Docs as a way to publish my underlining data set online inspired by the work of DataBlog at the Guardian (@datastore) and the Texas Tribune (@TribData). These are two news organizations who have done some great work in the area of data journalism.

Besides researching, cleaning and gathering data while creating infographics, they have made a commitment to sharing the data with their readers so that they can contribute to the "sense-making" part of the project. In the case of the Guardian, they ask readers to post visualizations and mash-ups on their Flickr Group while the Tribune's data set on government salaries (gathered through the Texas Public Information Act) has been very useful for my own project on Income in the U.S. as I plan to use it to illustrate state government salaries.

I recently found a great co-working space here in Hoboken, N.J. called Mission50. It has giving me "co-workers" again, something I have missed since I left the 9-to-5 office world. I can bounce my ideas off people and get suggestions when I am working through a problem I haven't tackled before, for example where to find a good printer. And after 15 years of going to work each day, I find I missed that routine and I am glad to have it again.

Finally, I am presenting my work on the Illustrated Guide to Income at The Big Picture Conference Oct. 11 here in New York City.

Friday, August 12, 2011

I would like to first thank the J-Lab and the judges for selecting me for a New Media Women Entrepreneurs grant. I am delighted to be chosen since it will allow me to continue my work on VisualizingEconomics.com over the next year as I experiment with new ways of delivering economic data visualizations to a broader audience.

I am currently working on the first of my illustrated guides about income in the United States. This will be a comprehensive overview of the subject using data placed in historical context (an "infographic explainer"). With this guide funded by my Kickstarter project, I will be using my NMWE grant to start additional guides while building out my website to provide access to these new infographics and the data I used in creating them, including background information about how they are made.

My main goal is to find a balance between giving students, teachers, journalists access to this work while creating an income from the sales of high-quality digital and print products based in the guides. However, my secondary goal is to support other people in the creation of their own infographics. There is an abundance of economic data on the web today, more than any one person can hope to tackle. I hope my site becomes both an inspiration and a place that shows people where to begin their own projects.

Over the past five years, I have seen the interest in infographics increase while the tools to make them are becoming more accessible. I believe with the vast amount of economic data available, there is now an opportunity to experiment with new ways of explaining the economy using data graphics and I hope my work will be a valuable contribution.