It’s useful to draw a distinction between data and information here, data being raw sensor readings or direct observations and information being additional context and interpretation based on data. There’s a difference in what needs to be done in terms of transparency of data (which the Time did magnificently for the interactive polling piece) and transparency of information. This is because there is a layer of contextualization and interpretation that also needs to be explicated in order to be transparent about information. This touches on issues of individual and organizational biases since interpretation itself is influenced by these outside sources. Moreover interpretation can be something encoded into mathematical equations that produce information (derived values) from the actual raw data. Consider the mean of all polls for each candidate. This is a derived value, albeit one that most people understand readily, but nonetheless which takes an interpretive stance that a mean of polling data collected under different circumstances is meaningful. As we move from simple means to more complexity, a data driven model is really nothing more than a series of complex mathematical manipulations which interpret the data into a manageable form of information.

Here’s the crux: to be transparent about information (interpretation from data), journalists need a way to be express interpretations or manipulations, mathematical though they may be, in a way that is easily understood. This has direct bearing on games for journalism since the models on which games interpret the world will be important to explicate to consumers in the spirit of transparency. The problem alas is that math is inpenetrable to many. Imagine the Times providing a 3rd link for transparency, one which shows a nasty equation on top of which a simulation is built. This is important, because even though many people won’t take the time to understand it, the people that take the time to will be able to verify or understand the model. But what about the other people? They need Usable Transparency. I like to think that a simulation game like SimCity follows the principle of usable transparency – you don’t need to understand the simulation model to be able to make decisions in the game. The manual describes in prose what to do to alleviate trash problems, create more jobs, or reduce rush hour traffic jams. I think this is a useful paradigm that would serve journalists well in thinking about transparency as it relates to games. The collection of the data is important, check. The data itself is important, check. But the mathematical model which drives a simulation is important too. I would argue for a prose description of that model which itself is footnoted with grounding equations.

Overall the interface has a good “flow.” At the top is the ability to search for keywords and see where they showed up in the transcript. You can see the comparison between the word’s usage between Obama, McCain, and the moderator. Below this are two timelines, the problem is that while they are all intuitive, they are in the wrong hierarchical order. The top most timeline is the most “zoomed out,” but the next one down is the most “zoomed in.” Really they need to be re-ordered so that the middle timeline is the bottom most. This would be a more intuitive layout from least detailed to most detailed. What IS really nice about all of the timelines and what really helps navigation is all of the textual information that pops up when hovering. Also there’s some segmentation showing parts of the video where each of the debaters is speaking. I found it really helpful to be able to click any of these segments and navigate the video to there. There is some navigational integration with the transcript which is interesting too. For one you can click on a block of the transcript and that will navigate you to that section of the video. But still we’re dealing with blocks of text rather than individual words being linked into the video.

The other fantastic aspect of this tool is that it provides some level of integrated fact-checks. The fact checking is produced professionally by the Times and is presented as aligned with the different question segments.  It’s difficult to follow though because it’s in a tab which competes with the transcript itself and so you can’t see the context or anchor to where the fact checking is referring. It seems it would be a lot more helpful for comparison’s sake to be able to see both the transcript and also the fact checking at the same time. The other problem with the presentation of the fact checking is just that’s it’s really dense and hard to read through. Again, better contextualization with the video and the transcript would really help here.

Storytelling is one way to take information and make it interesting, relevant, and engaging to an audience. A way to make the significant matter to people. A way to raise awareness for a deeper issue by telling a good story. Another approach is to take raw data or information and to make it engaging through interaction. Games, information visualization, and other interactive data driven applications fit into this latter area. In this sense, the journalism of awareness can fully embrace new media as a vector for raising awareness for issues in the news, even if this new media falls short of that gold standard of journalism.

Here are some examples of what I mean by the Journalism of Awareness:

Online news quizzes of the sort found on facebook, for one, serve to raise awareness for news information. I think the quiz mechanic gets lambasted undeservingly for being “too simple” or “not interactive.” It’s raising awareness for news information without getting deep. That’s OK. If you get something wrong, you were still exposed to the quiz question and have a chance to go back afterwards and read the original news item if you care to. The downside is, if you’re not interested in news to begin with chances are you won’t go out of your way to try and complete a news quiz. The other downside is that someone has to sit there and write the questions and answers for these news quizzes: there’s a non-zero authoring cost.

Information visualization of the sort featured on Digg Labs is also a form of the journalism of awareness. These visualizations are dynamic and packed with information, but certainly don’t help you connect any dots. They’re there to provide an entry point to the information space, something that looks fun and visual to draw you in with enough of a snippet to get you interested in digging in. The upside here is that no authoring is necessary; Digg grabs the headline and first few sentences of the story as a summary automatically. There are LOTS of examples of calm, “ambient” visualizations which leave information scent in an environment to raise awareness.

Perhaps most promising for the journalism of awareness are those interactive games or applications that remediate already authored news content. This is because this opens up new avenues for engaging consumers and raising awareness for news using existing content. So for example we have the games featured on MSNBC’s NewsWare Site. While simple instantiations of classic arcade games, NewsBlaster and NewsBreaker use RSS news feeds to exposed the player of the game to pertinent headlines in the course of play. Another example of this is my own game, Audio Puzzler, a puzzle game which is played with short (~1 min) video snippets found online. The game is actually content agnostic, but when fed with news content such as video podcasts, it exposes people to the entire news video snippet in the course of solving the puzzle. These types of applications have the added benefit of engaging people who might not have otherwise been exposed to the information. This is in comparison to the quiz or info viz examples which presuppose an initial interest by the user. Perhaps in the course of playing, awareness is raised and questions spawned. That can help feed the awareness instinct and is perhaps a first step in getting people to actively engage the news.

Whether something is misleading or mistaken has to do with the intentionality of the communicator, however what one perceives in the end is still the same: lower quality information. I think it would be difficult to show that someone had the intention to mislead because that information is shared only by the creator of the information, or at best the institution. Based on just the end product there’s no way to know the intentionality. If we could tell if a communicator was intentionally misleading, we would be able to factor this in to their reputation score. However, there are some cues that can raise suspicions about intentionality such as the relationship of the communicator to advertisers, the political leanings of the communicator, and the funding source for the production of the information. But these aren’t smoking guns; just because a cell phone maker pays for a study on the dangers of cell phone use, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the results are biased. But it does give us pause to think about the intentions of the producer of the information.

So back to the original question: should information quality address intentional bias? Yes, I think it should, but since the true intentions of a communicator are hidden, we have to rely on the cues that I listed above. The more intentionally biased a source is, the more this should in turn affect their credibility rating; in fact this could be thought of as another facet of source annotation for the system that I’m building.