WorldPOTUS
Accuat Studio developed interactive program, known as WorldPOTUS, during the season of the 2016 US presidential election, a political event that seemed to have sparked strong partisanship, media coverage, and interest rates unlike any other election season in recent memory. The rapture of the election and its candidate didn’t stop at American borders, so Accuat Studios, working with data from Google Trends made accessible with collaboration with members of Google News Labs, synthesized this project to represent the global interest rates of top political issues for each candidate. By using data of Google searches based on location, the studio created this as part of a experiment in how to further implement Google data into the news industry.
The studio used opensource for the coding, with the program being based on React framework and WebGL. One of the biggest consideration of how the data is being displayed is the use of more free form “blobs.” Since human opinions are always shifting, it would be inaccurate to simply use a precise geometry to represent them. Instead, the visuals are fluidly moving to better demonstrate a general sense of conclusion that can be taken from analysis of the data, rather than regarding the data as perfect. The developers are widening the horizons of American politics to show that its impact can be felt worldwide, that it is not just the American people who have an input on what is happening. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the rest of the world have their eyes on the United States and who citizens are electing to be their representative. The data visualization does lack in showing the position of other countries on the candidates and their stance on major political majors. A nation could be expressing particular interest in a candidate on a certain issue because they may support that candidate. For that matter, the program also doesn’t say what each candidate has said about the political matters at hand. There has to be some sort of reasoning for why some issues are trending more than others.