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Chapter 11: Digital Storytelling: Design and Data

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Assignments

  1. Forbes magazine in the United States and the Guardian newspaper in Great Britain have created maps to indicate the most influential media in each country. Check out the interactive maps at http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2012/media-map.html and http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2012/may/16/twitter-news-map-britain. Figure out what stories can be developed from this picture. Check out the databases for how you might be able to localize the story and focus the map on your state or city.
  2. David McCandless, a data journalist and information designer, has created several interactive data visualizations at http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/. Click the play pull-down and examine his look at health claims or media scare stories. Figure out what stories can be developed from these visualizations.
  3. Go to www.wordle.net or IBM’s http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/ and create a tag cloud (IBM) or word cloud (Wordle) from a State of the Union or State of the State address. Try to contrast and compare word clouds from one year’s speech to the next. Figure out what stories can be developed from these visualizations.
  4. Check out the information from the Poynter Institute’s EyeTrack study to pick up a few ideas on how to better design your multimedia material.
  5. Go to http://www.nsse.iub.edu/, the website for the National Survey of Student Engagement and find the latest survey results report. Decide on what story you want to tell from the report and figure out a data visualization project to do so.