Tag Archives: Martin

Journalism in the Age of Data

Very interesting video report by Geoff McGhee.

Below I embed the first chapter but there are 8 of them! In the first one, Fernanda Viègas and Martin Wattenberg speak about what they mean by visualization (and the great projects they have been doing, up to now when they joined the the Google’s “Big Picture” data visualization group!) and then there is Ben Fry who I love because of processing.org. WOW!

Journalism in the Age of Data from Geoff McGhee on Vimeo.

Description: Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays?

Key points:
• The explosion of data has brought a complementary need for tools to analyze it (Ch. 1, 7)
• Researchers in visualization are helping by building tools for non•experts (Ch. 1, 7)
• Journalists are finding ways to adapt to the challenge of telling stories with data (Ch. 2, 3)
• With experience in charting data, infographics designers are well suited to bring data vis to journalism, but they debate how effective it is at explaining concepts (Ch. 4)
• In a wired world, data is increasingly becoming a medium of personal expression (Ch. 5)
• Data will increasingly arrive in real time, challenging our ability to absorb, analyze and display it (Ch. 5)
• Technologies for creating online visualizations are in transition, but there are new tools coming out that will make the process easier (Ch. 7)
• Data analysis is at least as important as visually displaying it; there are tools that help with this process (Ch. 6)

Geoff McGhee is an online journalist specializing in multimedia and information graphics. Over the past decade he has worked at The New York Times and ABCNews.com, and in France at Le Monde Interactif. In 2009-2010, he spent a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University studying data visualization. In July 2010, McGhee began a new job developing visualizations and interactive content for the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford.

Journalism in the Age of Data by Geoff McGhee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.