What is a Picture Worth?

 The Chinese, it is said, said that a Picture is worth one thousand words.   Did they really say that?  Well, Confucius often gets the credit, but someone did research and claims that Fred R. Barnard first used this in print in 1921 in an advertising trade journal.   I think I'll bet on Confucius, but let's explore this a bit.

I first learned about this rule around age 10, when we got our first black-and-white television set.  I'd read vociferously, many accounts about World War II battles iin borrowed Britannica encyclopedias, only to discover that the word-images that I had constructed about many events did not match hardly at all the new dynamic images flashing on our TV in 1950.

Moreover, you could only borrow one volume at a time (my neighbor's limit), so you could read about Navies, Norway and Neanderthals just fine, but you had no immediate recourse to complementary stories about Armies, Sweden or Piltdown Man (not yet known as a fraud) until a separate volume was available

And then, in a late-life maneuver, I tackled the question posed in "Jaws" where the ship-mate, upon his first encounter with the huge shark, stumbles into the main cabin, and blurts out to the captian, "we're going to need a bigger boat."

I composed a possible "image-driven answer" for that one.  What kind of boat, how big--and produced the following image, alog with a short video.

Here's the short video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqwmQHCNE0E

Note that each of these ten pictures could easily be worth 1,000 words by themselves.

But notice the small yellow box--image-driven stories means adding voice to the images, ala the video.  And graphical analytics complete the picture for any content with data inclusion.   So, while the Chinese might have coined a great idea, there is more to the story in a multi-mediated world.