How do you pronounce 'caramel'?
Sometimes, we are delighted by people in the communication industry who put a variety of media to use, resulting in a productive 'omnipresence'.
Superior to that, in the Champions League of Communications so to say, are those experts who let different parts of their story work together and produce new content as a result. So did one of those bright minds at the New York Times.
In an earlier post we highlighted how smart it is to re-pack existing content. Well, here we've got a great example, because the method is already active for more then a decade, and still can be activated through its developer Dr. Bert Vaux on his current website. The recent re-use of available methods lead to an explosive raise of visits on all connected platforms, one article gathering more than 21 million views because the piece went viral on social media.
The cross-pollination we are referring to was developed by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times. He put together a dialect quiz that leads to your 'personal dialect map', showing the hot zones on the map of the USA on the way you speak, the regions the most similar to your speech. Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on a very thorough linguistics project which began in 2002, the Harvard Dialect Survey.
The data for the quiz and maps shown come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 directly from the readers of the NYT. 'The colors on the large heat map correspond to the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question', explains the NYT.
The appealing part about this project is the perfect co-creation of inter-activity, research and data-visualization. Resulting in a close-to-unique output: your personal map. This could be fertile ground for a next step that adds new items, e.g. an interactive info-graphic like Wired and Popular Scoence used to make in their iPad apps. We're heading for multimedial layered visuals instead of articles. Can't wait!