by Jeanne Bernish on December 29, 2011
My father told me when I applied for and received my first credit card never to use it to buy groceries. I was already out of college and working full time (back in the 80′s credit cards were not handed out willy-nilly as they seem to have been in later decades). I don’t quite remember the circumstances but his admonishment stayed with me for many years. It’s not that he was against using credit – not at all. But within his words was a cautionary tale – if I had to go into debt for basic necessities of life I needed to rethink my spending habits.
So when Mitt Romney was reported to have said that PBS should have ads I wondered along with @PaulB67 if this was “the end of life as we know it, or a reasonable idea for #PBS funding?” Romney’s litmus test (if I can call it that):
During an appearance in Clinton, Iowa, Romney said “My test is — is a program so critical that it’s worth borrowing money from China to pay for it?”
How simple and elegant a solution. Isn’t that the question we (should) ask ourselves before spending money on extras when money and credit is tight? And I don’t mean to demean the value of PBS – I love PBS. But I have been lately immersed in the notion of sustainability – particularly as it applies to the social enterprise. If PBS could become self-sustaining, shouldn’t it? And could it do so and maintain the quality and diversity of programming we have long enjoyed?
by Jeanne Bernish on November 10, 2011
I lost a friend to breast cancer last month – author Linda Sanders. I first met Linda when I went to work for KnowledgeWorks. Linda was the go-to freelance writer I was encouraged to use in my first web development project for the foundation. Every word of content on the site was drafted by her. We didn’t always see eye to eye – I railed against using rhetoric I felt placed greater distance between educators and real world advocates. Linda usually won. In the end I think her language set the right tone and meaning.
I have to admit that it was easy to put myself in her shoes – the audience of freelance writerly-types who are often underpaid or underappreciated – and who take great pride in their craft. I didn’t put up much of a fight. I knew what it was like – working late at night crafting language for a client. Except Linda didn’t have to guess at content particulars – she knew them. I also admired her greatly and loved the autographed copy she gave me for my daughter of her just published book, Maggie’s Monkeys. Tonight we will celebrate her life, appropriately, at Grailville. Although I have always wanted to go there I wish it were for a celebration of her life that she was present for. Isn’t it true with friends that they can come to us when we least expect it – or think we need it – but it is never an intrusion and we always seem to have room for them?
by Jeanne Bernish on October 25, 2011
I was shocked to read that “the tag clouds train has left Rock City” in a design blog post from April 2005. The post was referenced in a recently published (October 2011) blog by Jacob Harris, the NYT senior software architect, in a larger piece about journalism and data visualization, which is how I came across it during one of my seemingly random perusals of the internet.
Other than the personal embarrassment in the realization that my last few family holiday cards used a customized version of the word cloud to replace the dreadful “holiday letter” (which I have never been guilty of producing but reserve the right to do so in my dotage), I fully understand the disdain with which any journalist would view this simplistic visualization tool. It is, after all, an automatically generated cloud of words with font emphasis to denote frequency of use. The most common free tool for creating one can be found at Wordle.
Social media rating services routinely use category clouds to describe the users most common tweets or subjects of interest (or authority). Sadly, mine usually consists of the most oft repeated RT (for ReTweet) and the now ubiquitous # (hashtag) – I believe a poor indicator of what I truly focus on in the social media space (a more accurate portrayal would be EDUCATION, politics, CINCINNATI, ohio, etc. but these pale in sheer volume compared to what I would consider proper social media punctuation).
So all this got me thinking about data visualization in the education sector and political arenas. Making all that data available and visually appealing while holding on to accuracy is a challenge – particularly in the digital space where agate type resolution is iffy at best and EVERYTHING is footnoted. Enter politics and the reform candidacy of Ross Perot and his infamous pie charts – such simple and clear data visualization tool quickly embraced by the USA Today’s of the reporting sector. But are they accurate? Do they give us a down and dirty quick take on trend lines – or do they etch themselves onto our retinas and define the essence of what is important? In other words, if “what gets done gets measured” are these simplistic data visualization tools defining for us what we should care about? If we dig a little deeper into what a word cloud says about us, who gets to filter the end result?
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