This documentary is really captivating. I always enjoy looking at a nicely designed infographic and I really, really enjoy the videos that are basically animated information graphics. I think the emphasis on telling a story through the graphics and through the data is very important.
I liked when J. Paige West said, “If there was a way that we could confidently say here is the data and here you can play with it all you want but if you’re not into that here is a guided kind of interpretation of that…” it reminded me of a website that Xu showed us on President Obama’s inaugural speech. (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/01/22/us/politics/22obama-inaugural-speech-annotated.html?smid=fb-share#/?annotation=b85fa54df) It’s not specifically data and hard facts, but it has an interactive way to view the inauguration address or the user could just read or watch through it without doing any of the interactive aspects.
One of my favorite aspects was when they were discussing the intersection of data visualization with motion graphics with narrative. I have watched so many of these types of videos and always just thought they were really cool and really informative. I liked when Nigel Homes broke it down by saying that the motion graphics are the vital difference between what can be done for the web vs what can be done for print. The music, the sound affects, the motion, the story and the words could let all the data breathe.
Also, as a side note, I found it concerning that Amanda Cox, “the queen of infoviz” was more of a statistician than a designer because I have not taken a math class since my senior year in high school. However, I understand the need to be able to interpret the data in order to make a visual representation of it.
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