Unless you have put an extraordinary amount of effort into embracing your inner luddite for the last few months–not to mention avoiding most of literate humanity–you’ve at least heard of Serial. Serial is the podcast phenomenon narrated by This American Life‘s Sarah Koenig, which takes listeners on an investigative journey the 1999 murder of 17 year old Hae Min Lee, a murder for which her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed was convicted. If you somehow missed out on this, catch up on the cultural impact, at least, by reading the Washington Post’s “‘Serial’: An Investigative Journalism Project Becomes a Cultural Obsession.”
Serial has spawned numerous debates and discussions, and at least one “Cereal-eating party to listen to the final episode of Serial.” But it has also led to some interesting approaches to information design as listeners try to suss out the truth. The Serial folks provide you with the basics, such as a detailed timeline to accompany copies of documents,
cell phone call logs, and maps. But other media, as well as fans, have developed some interesting ways of looking at the mountain of data.
Vox created an interactive guide to each episode, so if you need to revisit exactly what the high school track coach said about Adnan and track practice the afternoon of the murder, you can easily find the reference at minute 24:49 of Episode 1. There are cell tower maps, and aerial views of the murder site. A Google Maps Gallery with all relevant locations dutifully noted.
There are visualizations of the data (not always meaningful), and infographics that reject meaningful and instead are just fun.
And, of course, maps of locations where bodies have been found in Leakin Park.
While some of the artifacts were designed by the Serial reporting team or by other professional journalism outfits, many have been made by fans of the show. These sometimes inaccurate-and-poorly-designed creations show how important information design is to understanding a complex topic. The series itself was a pleasure to listen to, and for the purpose of the podcast was rightly crafted to tell a story of discovery. But to actually make sense of the complicated story filled with contradictory testimony the information needs to be looked in a more structured fashion, carefully organized to show gaps and areas of contention. Moreover, it needs to be presented in multiple ways. Before the side-by-side timelines are actually prepared the specific problems aren’t apparent.
The Serial team no doubt used many information visualizations to help with their analysis, and some they shared with their audience. But the creation of many more visualizations shows the importance of information design to determining who done it.