Carl V. Lewis

For a lot of self-indulgent reasons, I secretly love The Huffington Post. But well-designed visualizations and interactive interfaces have never been the news organization’s strong suit. While their live coverage of Tuesday night’s GOP primary in Michigan had all the flavor of a classic HuffPo report – updates faster than you can send a Tweet, [...]

This map displays the results from Tuesday night’s Michigan GOP primary by county. The darker shade blue represents a higher percentage of voters for Mitt Romney, who narrowly won the race despite Michigan being his native state. Click on each county to see a breakdown of how Michigan Republicans cast their ballots. SOURCE: Michigan Dept. [...]

So I’ll admit it: I’ve always kind of had a design crush on the Guardian‘s website, and I may or may not have tried to emulate it in various other news websites I’ve developed. What I love most about the Guardian’s design is simply its proprietary typeface. That slightly “Georgia” looking serif with the curbed [...]

In contrast with Norman –– who argues flatly for programmers to adopt a more immersive, task-centered approach to computer design rooted in cultural conventions ––Manovich contends in his paper on human-computer interfaces that designers should instead seek to embrace the new language of the computer medium, the language of the interface. The failure of programmers [...]

Design is too often designer-centric instead of user-centric, argues Donald Norman in the sixth chapter of his book The Design of Everyday Things. Norman lays out the case that anyone acting as a designer – whether programmer, illustrator or developer – has an unconscious tendency to be device-oriented rather than task-oriented; that is, designers “become experts with [...]

Take a look at this fascinating visualization of last weekend’s Superbowl ads created using a new startup tool called Hotspots.io. What’s unique about this visualization is that it provides an interactive, feature-rich multimedia presentation of social media reaction in real time as it relates to live events. The sheer amount of data displayed – from [...]

The job of a journalist is to convey the facts. But when the facts conflict with an individual’s preexisting beliefs, they often tend to get pushed aside. That’s where the research of Nyhan and Reifler comes into play. In their 2011 study “Opening the Political Mind,” Nyhan and Reifler conduct a series of experiments to [...]

Setting the guidelines for the social, political and human consequences of research in the database age is an issue that has yet to be fully explored. On one hand, the champions of publicness and digital democracy argue for absolute transparency and data freedom. On the other, privacy advocates consistently take issue with what they see [...]

In the first chapter of his book Data Analysis for Politics and Policy, Yale researcher Edward R. Tufte demonstrates the opportunities as well as the challenges of using data to help inform decisions of public policy. First, Tufte sets forth the various terms and theoretical frameworks he will be using to analyze data. He advocates [...]