Matt Ericson, the top-flight map/infographics journalist/designer at The New York Times, produced another fine piece of work Tuesday related to changes in the Roman Catholic world.  But what we get in print is superior [click here to see IoP version] to the online version of the cartogram (i.e. proportional map), which illustrates how the church has grown in Latin America, Africa and Asia.  The print page positions the RC world c. 1900 right next to the RC population c. 2005.  Readers' eyes can quickly shift from one region to the other and see the differences.  On the other hand, the online treatment of those graphics, while supplying data for three different eras -- 1900, 1978, 2005 -- bring up each era individually, making it difficult to compare one to the others.  Snazzy presentation, but at a loss of comprehension.  Go to NYT story "Third World Represeents a New Factor in Pope's Succession"  and click on the right column link for "Interactive: After John Paul II."  Then, after the java window pops up, click on "Changes in Catholics."

Elliott Parker, and the Journet listserv, tips us to a NewScientist.com report....
"Governments and big business like to indulge in media spin, and that means knowing what is being said about them. But finding out is becoming ever more difficult, with thousands of news outlets, websites and blogs to monitor.
"Now a British company is about to launch a software program that can automatically gauge the tone of any electronic document. It can tell whether a newspaper article is reporting a political party’s policy in a positive or negative light, for instance, or whether an online review is praising a product or damning it. Welcome to the automation of PR. " http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7210&feedId=online-news_rss20)--at

Interesting perhaps in its nuance, but hardly new in concept. Here at the IAJ we've long been impressed with the work done at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory around "information visualization."
"Information Visualization is the direct visualization of a representation of selected features or elements of complex multi-dimensional data. Data that can be used to create a visualization includes text, image data, sound, voice, video - and of course, all kinds of numerical data." See http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/about.html and http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/technologies.html