The Big Data of Big Hair

The Big Data of Big Hair

by Charmaine Chitate -
Number of replies: 0

I chose  "The Big Data of Big Hair" by The Pudding's Elle O'Brien and Jan Diehm.

The story is kick-started by a

which is a summation of the written content below. It shares with the reader, the types of data sourced and the elements used. 

As the data series is over an 80 year timeline, the story makes use of a time series. The design is clean and mostly in black and white to avoid distracting the reader for example, from focusing on race and quality of images/photography. The time series used is responses and invites the reader to slide to a particular period and view the relational images showing the average hairstyle of that period.


Unless the reader is technically sound, the narrative supporting the story is a bit too technical. It would be great to view that text in a "How to.." section as opposed to the story itself. The font size is a little daunting and makes it seem like there's a lot to read and given the average attention span of a reader, they will switch pages. If the text was distributed into slides it would look less daunting and I am sure the pudding would be better. A good example is  "The Aftermath of a YouTube Apology" by  Arjun Kakkar and Russell Goldenberg.