style.org > Parsing the State of the Union
See here’s another one and this gets closer to to just aggravating me than the first. The guy says that rather than discuss style or presentation he just wants to show a couple of things that are easily measured. OK, so fair enough. But just because you measure something doesn’t mean it tells you anything important, or anything worth knowing.
I could measure the height of everyone who works for the BBC and do visualisations of how departments compared in terms of height. So what? Does height have any significant impact on the ability of a person to work in a large media organisation? Does length of sentence or number of words per speech tell us anything about the content of that speech that is edifying, useful, or even interesting?
Or are we just visualising things because we can? As if the management consultant obsession with measuring things wasn’t frustrating and pointless enough, now we must spend our time looking at pretty visualisations of those same meansurements, not to mention all the new things people are measuring so they can make visualisations of them.
