I loved this article about information designer Jonathan Harris — even if it did use for its headline the same phrase that is the title of my book.
Several years ago, Harris created the 10×10 Web site — a snapshot of the moment’s hot news presented in the form of an image collage. He now he works as design director at Daylife. He’s a specialist in creating visualizations of Web-based pools of information — like his current project, We Feel Fine, which scours the Web for statements by bloggers and others that take the form “I feel [X]” and presents them in a novel interface that you can explore and also filter according to multiple criteria.
But these sites are best explored rather than explained. Have a look. Perhaps you will feel, as I did, happy to see such creative reuse of the Web’s expressive bounty.
UPDATE: I meant to highlight this quote from the end of the piece, with its perspective on digital storytelling:
Trying to depict everything is a fool’s game, and ultimately not that interesting — because it’s just as confusing and complicated as life. So then the task becomes limiting your scope, and within a limited scope providing amazing complexity and depth. That’s this process of ‘lens making’: coming up with a lens that you can point at all of reality but that only lets through certain things. That process is digital storytelling. It’s a process of exclusion — not a process of mimicry.
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