If you haven’t already, drop everything and take a few minutes to immerse yourself in an interactive map hosted by The New York Times that is collecting the memories and moods of people as they wrestle with the tenth anniversary of 9-11. It’s part of a rich array of material, some interactive and some traditional, that the Times has just rolled out on its website, titled “The Reckoning.”
The Times’ digital team has done this kind of crowd-sourced story-telling before, most notably in my mind with its 2008 “election wordtrain” that gathered and displayed, in real-time, the contributions of Obama and McCain supporters as they digested the results of the presidential election.
But this new map goes further in demonstrating the potential of the social web to produce a completely new kind of story-telling, where we the people formerly known as the audience are enabled by some entity with a mass-gathering platform produce a bigger picture from our individual parts. Or, as Paul Simon put it, where we get to see “the way we look to us all.” It’s a genre in need of a name, so we can do a better job of recognizing and elevating the practice. The best I’ve come up with is 3-D journalism, for dynamic, data-driven story-telling. Some other great examples of the emerging form:
Flight Patterns, artist Aaron Koblin’s depiction of a day in the life of air travel, which is built on top of FAA data.
Trendsmap, which shows terms that are currently trending high on Twitter, overlaid geographically.
Wikistream, which shows real-time edits to Wikipedia, and Wikirage, which tracks which pages are currently getting the most edits.
Unlike these projects, which tap and map the emergent patterns that result as a side effect of people’s data exhaust, the New York Times is actively inviting participation in producing a story that is designed to show something hidden–where we were on 9-11 and how we feel today. By using color to convey moods, a broad pointilistic picture of hope, anger or indifference is painted. And by inviting individuals to place themselves on the map and add their (140-character) personal comment, the map makes it possible for us to go much deeper than any public opinion poll could ever do. And even more intriguing, the site invites users to share and spread their findings, by embracing a common hashtag (#911plus10). Had the Times not ended its ill-fated experiment in building a user community then perhaps this project could have been useful in generating a rich networked conversation. But even without that, what you’re going to find is an evolving story that gets better and richer the more people find it and add to it. Kudos!
Imagine such a map for Election Day, where people share their vote and add a comment, or for the next major vote in Congress, where users say whether they agree with their representatives’ vote and offer their feedback….