Multi-modal IRP’s

If I present information to you orally, you’ll probably only remember about 10% 72 hours after exposure, but if I add a picture, recall soars to 65%.

–Alex Lundry (2009): Chart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization

How you present visual information is important. And my students are discovering this as they work up their Independent Research Projects (IRP’s) this week.

In the spring they are fairly free to pick their topic and style of IRP. Some choose research projects, others term papers, and a few do things that strike their fancy, like writing fiction or programming games.

In the end, they submit a written report and give a presentation.

For research projects, I have one student who did a great job of coming up with a hypothesis and testing it. He even compiled a nice table of his data for his results section, but was reluctant to go through the effort of making a graph. After all, he claimed, anyone reading his report (or watching his PowerPoint presentation) could just look at the table and read the data off there themselves.

My response was that people absorb the data much more effectively when it’s presented graphically. Fortunately, Alex Lundry has a nice little presentation that reinforces this point. It also gives a few tips about what to look out for in graphics, because they can be used to mislead.

The key quote (via The Dish) is this:

Vision is our most dominant sense. It takes up 50% of our brain’s resources. And despite the visual nature of text, pictures are actually a superior and more efficient delivery mechanism for information. In neurology, this is called the ‘pictorial superiority effect’ […] If I present information to you orally, you’ll probably only remember about 10% 72 hours after exposure, but if I add a picture, recall soars to 65%. So we are hard-wired to find visualization more compelling than a spreadsheet, a speech of a memo.

–Alex Lundry (2009): Chart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization

Here’s Lundry’s five minute presentation.

Vietnam in pictures

American Marine in Da Nang, Vietnam, August 3, 1965. (Image from the U.S. Marine Corps.)
American Marine in Da Nang, Vietnam, August 3, 1965. (Image from the U.S. Marine Corps.)

A slew of ideas and conflicts swirl around the Vietnam War: democracy, communism, dictatorship, freedom, colonialism, domino theory, chemical warfare, technology …. We’re supposed to look at wars through the lens of the “Characteristics of War”, but what do offense and defense mean in a war like Vietnam? A close examination of any of these words in the face of Vietnam leaves more questions than answers. The Boston Globe has a heartbreaking collection of images from the Vietnam War that give a remarkably multifaceted view of the conflict and its consequences. The photos are iconic and some are graphic.

A guerrilla in the Mekong Delta paddles through a mangrove forest defoliated by Agent Orange (1970). Photograph by Le Minh Truong © National Geographic Society (from the International Center for Photography).

The photographs in the Boston Globe were mostly taken by western photographers (some were from the U.S. military), whose journalistic culture inspired them to try to capture all aspects of the war, to tell the whole story, independent of their own allegiance. There were fewer North Vietnamese photographers and their job was to capture images that would promote their side of the war. Even so, some of their photographs are also amazing and offer another perspective.

Photograph taken by a North Vietnamese war photographer (from SmugMug).

National Geographic collected some of these photos in Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side. More photos are available from SnugMug.com, and National Geographic has a documentary on North Vietnamese photographers called, Vietnam – The Unseen War (a 5 minute preview is available on VEOH).

These images help tell the story of how powerful the media can be, particularly in a democracy. What’s also interesting is the youth of many of the combatants on both sides.

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