Interactive examples

UNC student reflects on importance of multimedia programming

UNC multimedia student Grace Koerber blew me away during the SND portfolio review when she showed her latest multimedia interactive — a class project from Donny Lofland’s multimedia programming class. Having taken this class several years ago, I am impressed by the breadth of programming knowledge that multimedia journalists are now being asked to learn. Of course I could always preach about the importance of this skill set, but I asked Grace to give us an outside perspective. Below, she writes about her experience learning how to program, this project, and how she feels programming will help her as a journalist.

*Just a hint to employers, Grace is graduating in May …

“The goal of this piece was to create an interactive that explains current energy production and consumption patterns worldwide, informs the audience of local trends and shows users the effects of their individual energy consumption on their carbon footprint.

The interactive was a class assignment for an advanced programming class required for all multimedia journalism students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is programmed primarily through ActionScript 2.0, with all data and informative text parsed externally from XML. PHP is also used to communicate between the flash interactive and a MySQL database to store user information.

Three categories, “Global Look,” “Local Look,” and “Your Look,” organize the material from general to personal categories. Flash’s drawing API is extensively used to create the dynamic graphs and charts of both “Global Look” and “Local Look.” In the first, “Global Look,” parsed XML data is stored into specific arrays according energy type per world region. An ActionScript class generates dynamic bar graphs using Flash’s drawing API for an individual world-region. This one class generates all graphs according to which parameters the function receives. The same general technique is used in, “Local Look,” to create the gasoline price graph.

The carbon footprint calculator uses the data received from user input in order to calculate their individual carbon footprint. These calculations are dependant on state prices of different energy sources, as well as the manner in which these energy sources are produced. Once the form is completed, the user submits the information to a MySQL database through PHP. The PHP also retrieves the average carbon footprint from all users from the database and returns the value to the flash interactive.

Overall, I’m pleased with the results of this interactive, but I think that with energy as a topic of current concern, improvements could have been made to prolong its life. Live data, rather than the dependence on XML would have ensured up-to-date information, as well as cutout time creating XML. I also think that this interactive would be more effective if it were broken down into smaller components. I think that this amount of interactive material is overwhelming for the user to thoroughly explore and engage with. I think that if each panel of the interactive were broken down and paired with an appropriate article or text element, it would be less intimidating for people unaccustomed to interactive elements on the Web.

Completing this interactive took somewhere around 120 hours. A lot of this time was spent learning how to use Flash’s drawing API and use PHP to communicate between Flash and a MySQL database, both of which I had never done before. The amount of research was also particularly time-consuming.

Classes like these are preparing young journalists with a skill set for a new type of storytelling. By combining elements like this with text, and other media such as video and photo, a more complete picture can be made. Although this course was taxing and stressful, it’s rewarding to know that I have this beginning skill set and a solid base to expand on.”

Other posts that might interest you:

• Behind the scenes of The Columbus Dispatch’s “Death Perceptions”
• Tampa Bay Mug Shots utilizes Django for innovative database
• BBC News uses data wisely in “Mapping UK’s Teen Murder Toll”

© 10 March 2009 Innovative Interactivity (II).