Stowe Boyd

Megan Garber, The New York Times’ R&D Lab has built a tool that explores the life stories take in the social space
For the past several months, the R&D Lab has been working, quietly, on a time-based representation of how the Times’ news content is being shared in Twitter’s social space. Its name: Project Cascade. Superficially, it’s a data visualization, but it’s actually a tool that could, ever so slightly, change the way we think about online engagement.
It’s the product of a collaboration among Mark Hansen, the UCLA stats professor who spent a spring 2010 sabbatical working at the Times as what Zimbalist calls the paper’s “futurist-in-residence” — that casual title alone offers evidence of the scope of the R&D Lab’s ambition — along with Jer Thorp (data artist in residence) and Jake Porway (data scientist). And it has, despite its pragmatic uses, a firmly artistic attitude: Hansen, along with the artist Ben Rubin, designed the “Moveable Type” screen installation in the Times’ lobby, and Thorp, whose work we’ve written about previously, has converted data from the Times’ API into visualizations that are both revealing and stunning.

I’ve seen the Project Cascade demo several times at Betaworks’ events. Fascinating insights into the near-randomness of stories ‘taking off’ on Twitter based on a chance retweet, and ideas finding the right mind in which to grow; a stratling revelation about social contagion in general, and the role that Twitter has grown into within the realm of open social discourse.

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Megan Garber, The New York Times’ R&D Lab has built a tool that explores the life stories take in the social space

For the past several months, the R&D Lab has been working, quietly, on a time-based representation of how the Times’ news content is being shared in Twitter’s social space. Its name: Project Cascade. Superficially, it’s a data visualization, but it’s actually a tool that could, ever so slightly, change the way we think about online engagement.

It’s the product of a collaboration among Mark Hansen, the UCLA stats professor who spent a spring 2010 sabbatical working at the Times as what Zimbalist calls the paper’s “futurist-in-residence” — that casual title alone offers evidence of the scope of the R&D Lab’s ambition — along with Jer Thorp (data artist in residence) and Jake Porway (data scientist). And it has, despite its pragmatic uses, a firmly artistic attitude: Hansen, along with the artist Ben Rubin, designed the “Moveable Type” screen installation in the Times’ lobby, and Thorp, whose work we’ve written about previously, has converted data from the Times’ API into visualizations that are both revealing and stunning.

I’ve seen the Project Cascade demo several times at Betaworks’ events. Fascinating insights into the near-randomness of stories ‘taking off’ on Twitter based on a chance retweet, and ideas finding the right mind in which to grow; a stratling revelation about social contagion in general, and the role that Twitter has grown into within the realm of open social discourse.