e-valuation

The Foundation world is one where evaluation practice has flourished in recent years, indeed some exciting innovations in thinking about and doing evaluation have come from the energy and resources Foundations have put into evaluation of their efforts. While in the past Foundations have focused on the value of merely doing something socially responsible there was less focus on whether or not their largesse was making any difference. The power of evaluation can be seen by the more recent likelihood of Foundations revealing when their injections of funds and enthusiasm do NOT have the anticipated outcomes. Perhaps this is just the new accountability era effect, but evaluation is at the center of these fuller disclosures.

Maps are a common image that serve many purposes. Sometimes a root metaphor (depicting anything as a journey or spatial relations), always with an aesthetic element, and usually meant to be informative (even if they are not always so). The blog Strangemaps is a collection of these various kinds of maps.

I have become a fan of Edward Tufte ~ he suggests that newspapers, like the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal, are light years ahead of social science in their ability to communicate large amounts of data in straightforward, comprehensible, and aesthetically pleasing ways. Here is an example of a simple kind of data (number of households mail is being delivered to) that over time illustrate the resurrection of New Orleans after Katrina. One could have used any uniform service to accomplish the same thing, but a mailing address exists whether any mail is actually delivered and does not differentiate people by class or race (like telephone or power service might).

There are any number of applications to evaluation for this particular data display, but it illustrates more generally ways to show the adoption or spread of something in geographic space.