“The 2014 government work report magnified” was designed at the tail end of that year’s Two Sessions, prompted by a request for a word cloud visualization of the Work Report from a member of China Daily's editorial board. The data crunching, design, text, and the visualization approach were by me in collaboration with Guillermo Munro, who focused on creating the visualizations. The blurbs at the bottom of the page were written by China Daily reporters He Na and Zhang Lei and then edited by me. We won a China Journalism Award — China's highest journalism prize — for this project. Wang Shanshan was the assigning editor for the project, and Chen Xiaofeng and Brian Liou were the Chinese and English copy editors respectively.

I think word clouds are a little cliche and quite ineffective in relating data.

While we ended up including an art directed version of a word cloud, I think the real substance of this page is in our analysis of the text itself. Based on word counts derived from grouped topics, we were able to quantify what were the most important issues covered by the work report.

Since designing this page, I’ve been introduced to more sophisticated tools and visualizations for lexicographical analysis, which I hope to someday use for future information graphics. 

I’m proud of this page. It was a rigorous examination of policy that nevertheless received an award from the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.