“Journalism in the Age of Data” has made me realize two things: the people who work in the info-graphics business are a little strange, and my group project on the economy needs to be tightened so that it tells more of a story. Luckily, I can do something about my second realization. During our critiques in class on Friday, Lou made the most important and useful observation about our project: it was missing a page that tied the whole story together. His idea was to do a final graphic on the government involvement during the Great Depression and the current recession. The two obvious examples being FDR’s New Deal and 2008’s $787 billion stimulus package.
The New York Times goes above and beyond with their data visualizations. I was most impressed with the porcupine line graph of current economic data, which then had the experts’ projected data that was always higher and more optimistic than what actually ended up happening. I wonder if Amanda Cox, the “queen” of info-graphics, only works on info-graphics or does she do other stuff as well for the New York Times. I think I would be incredibly bored only creating info-graphics as my job and thinking up new ways to tell the story of the information. I would have to be doing something else as well like we do in iMedia, flash projects mixed in with info-graphics and videos. I think it takes a certain person like you see in the video to be able to only do info-graphics for a living.
The section of the video “Life as a Data Stream” is the coolest part of the video. Nicholas Felton’s idea to go back and look at the past year of his life and turn that information into a book of info-graphics is a great and innovative idea. Someone in iMedia could do their capstone project on information like this and print it out into a little book like he did. I think this would be a very successful project because the concept is familiar but it has its own twist that makes it unique.