“This is a simple infographic, a basic line graph, the type of which I would have seen in my textbooks in the 1950s and ’60s. But infographics do not have to be complicated, pictorial, or even colorful to be effective. The bottom line is, “Does it tell a story in an effective and compelling way.”
Of course, the skill of reading any graphic is asking questions:
- What is the story?
- What does the teller have to gain by telling this story?
- Are we being introduced to all of the characters of the story?
- What if the protagonist and antagonist were to change places?
This one comes from MIT’s Technology Review. The blog entry says,
America isn’t innovating like it used to. And by “like it used to,” I mean the period from after World War II to 1973, when an explosion of new technologies increased worker productivity at a pace that, had it continued to the present day, would mean an increase in the average worker’s wage of 51 percent, or $18 per hour. (This difference is represented by the gray area in the graph, above.)
Blog Entry: http://goo.gl/U27Fg
Graphic: http://goo.gl/5e3R9