Regina McCombs recently emailed me about an upcoming seminar from August 25-27 at The Poynter Institute that II readers may be interested in attending. Titled “Programming for Journalists / Journalism for Programmers,” attendees will gain a concrete understanding of how programmers and journalists can work effectively together to visualize data-rich content, such as the upcoming 2010 Census.
Last week I stumbled across the CNN interactive “Home and Away: Iraq and Afghanistan War Casualties,” and I was impressed at their ability to parse the immense amount of data into an aesthetically-pleasing and personal presentation. I am always interested to see how organizations depict this issue since there have been several versions over the years, such as The New York Times’ “Faces of the Dead,” and USA Today’s “Deaths in Iraq: A look at the American lives lost.”
Less than a year after Toyota wowed the interactive community with their “Why Not? Innovation Experience” site, they have launched “Beyond Cars,” a user-submitted interactive portal allowing their audience to discuss a “better tomorrow.” Their site provides a truly engaging experience as users move around a visually stimulating interface to read, watch, and view other people’s thoughts about our future.
With summer officially gone and my first week of class well under way, I have to admit that I am really excited about what lies ahead. I am taking a combination of theory and practical skills courses, so please let me know if one in particular interests you. I found that I blogged several times last Spring on particular readings or projects from class, so I am happy to do the same this semester if people find it helpful. Also, please let me know if you prefer learning about particularly good readings, or looking through coding examples and tutorials.
St. Petersburg Times launched a brilliant interactive on Monday, utilizing booking information to create a database of the most recent arrests in their area. According to Shelby Sapusek, a media-focused twitterer, this package received 100,000 hits in the first 3 hours. Now that’s what I call a return on investment! Even better, they bypassed Flash and produced this package with Django, an open-source software known for it’s rich database capabilities under a tight deadline.
The Columbus Dispatch producers Victor Black and Jeremy Lynch write a guest post detailing their latest project, Death Perceptions. In it, they describe how they parsed the data and integrated it into Flash with MySQL. “The project’s theme and design didn’t call for a lot of color, so we felt animation during the display of the query-results helped make otherwise static information more dynamic.”
One of the great advantages to judging multimedia competitions is the periodic influx of amazing multimedia projects to my inbox. While I was recently looking through the entries for the quarterly SNDies competition, one project in particular caught my eye. To be accurate, it was actually a part of a larger project that was linked [...]
