At Appalachian State, I had a professor named Lynette Holman. She’s a UNC grad and a former layout designer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. I ended up taking four classes with her, and we eventually became pretty good friends when she became an unofficial advisor to The Appalachian while I was on the ed board. But I can probably sum up her view of journalism and the future of journalism with one made up, slightly profane quote:
“More. Fucking. Infographics.”
And she wasn’t far off, and a lot of what she talked about was echoed in the documentary “Journalism in the Age of Data”. We live in an age where information can be distributed and consumed in so many different ways. Things aren’t static anymore. They can be interactive. You can provide feedback to an information system in ways that didn’t exist even five years ago. (I feel like I’ve written that sentence 50 times since I’ve enrolled in iMedia)
But the new ways of doing things create problems. There’s now so much noise. Since everybody can create an infographic, animate it and throw it on the internet, everybody has. You know, assuming they know the bare basic structure of how to work the programs to create it. But what really stood out to me during this documentary was trying to figure out how to create a story out of data. Data is, after all, just data. It does nothing but tell you what has been measured under a specific construct during a period of time. That’s it. It’s up to the animator and the journalist (now usually the same person) to figure out how to create context and make it mean something more than just numbers. Because, like Dr. Holman said, this is where we’re going. But it can’t just be straightforward reproductions of data. The new age of information graphics have to be engaging. And not in just a “move numbers around” way. It has to create a narrative that can only be told with the numbers you’re providing within the context that you’re creating.
Granted, this has problems. As brought up in the documentary, completeness becomes an issue. Stories need a beginning, middle and end along with development of ideas. It’s hard to achieve these storytelling goals without complete analysis of the data you’re studying and trying to convey.
Eventually I feel like this is something I could be doing. I just hope I can be able to tell the types of stories I want to tell.