Despite the length, I found this video pretty interesting. It showed how technology is changing the field of journalism as well as the way we collect and interpret data. The contributors to this documentary explained that these methods help us connect to data and understand it better through visualization. Visualization is the way most people learn best and how we connect to the outside world.
The most important thing I took away from the video is that there are good ways to present visual data to the masses and bad ways. If something has way too much data and the image is cluttered, people aren’t going to want to look at it or understand it. It’s important to capture the audience’s attention right away and do so in a format that’s easy to comprehend.
I also liked the examples about interactivity versus “here’s a bunch of data, click on it as you like”. I thought the vampire blood video/example was really interesting and creative. It shows a completely new format for sharing data and getting people more interested in the data.
I think this is an important video for people in the field of communications to watch in order to understand where data visualization is going and how PR and other professionals can manipulate this to their advantage.