This project has indeed been eye opening. The main thought behind doing this project, is to better understand the attention economy of maps and spatial based representation. Most maps being used within new rooms are 2 dimensional in nature. This project was to find use cased of three dimensional spatial representation. In all the project has been a success but more needs to be done in building tookits likely to make this simple in a news room. What would be the use case in a newsroom. Several journalists when providing a narrative use 3 dimensional representation of objects to explain certain events. A simple example is this flight disaster simulation. I also see this as a great tool to tell a narrative around flood simulation. It could also be used for games where the three dimensional structures are created as scenes within the game allowing for an experience close to the actual physical space.
More and more technologies are being used in newsrooms to tell such stories. With the advent of data, and a society with access to data. This experiment was to find ways in which such visualisations could be employed.
Mapsense is a simple first draft to test the concept of three dimensional spatial representation. It can be accessed here. http://jmwenda.github.io/mapsense. The image below depicts the representation of MIT.
One can zoom and pan the map in different ways. The data used to achieve this was Boston’s/Cambridge raster data collected in 2009. The height of the buildings was retrieved from the City of Cambridge, hence the heights of the buildings are in scale to one another. Data extracted from OSM was also used to provide as and act as the base map.
We have designed a workshop to be put on in Spanish speaking newsrooms that will bring journalists and coders together to work on a multi-faceted storytelling project where the data visualization component complements the written or podcasted work.
Objectives
We want to create a meeting point for Spanish speaking journalists seeking to improve the digital presentation of their stories but don’t know how with developers who want to establish a foothold in journalism.
With this workshop, journalists and coders will become more adept at using digital storytelling tools, have a chance to build something together that they both have a stake in, and see possibilities of what can be built.
The journalist will leave understanding which tools/techniques he/she can take back to the newsroom. Coders will leave with an expanded portfolio and a lesson in journalism.
Both journalists and coders will leave the workshop with a rolodex of contacts with whom to work on future projects.
Why in Spanish?
Because we think the Spanish speaking media still lacks the creation of a meeting point for journalists and developers. We think there are a lot of improvements to be made in digital fluency in these newsrooms, for media outlet websites to include digital storytelling tools. The major Spanish speaking media outlets have an antiquated web presence (e.g. New York’s El Diario, Peru’s El Comerio or Spain’s El Mundo).
We believe that the creation of a meeting point for developers and journalists will improve excellence in storytelling, spur media innovation and improve ways to reach a younger news consumer. Young Spanish speakers have increasing access to the Internet and journalists need to explore these digital avenues to attract news consumers of the future.
But we don’t only want to improve digital fluency in traditional media but also want to help the new wave of independent new media startups. There’s a surge of quality investigative journalists anxious to find new digital directions and meet developers to deploy those.
For whom?
(Five) Journalists hungry to complement their reporting with data visualization will each bring a story and a spreadsheet of their dataset that has been screened for ease-of-use by the organizing committee.
(Five) Coders with a keen interest in becoming a newsroom developer show their portfolio, bring ideas for what visualizations news outlets are missing and explain what kinds of projects they would like to work on.
Selection Criteria
The selection process is key. We are flying out, housing and feeding 5 journalists and 5 coders that are perfectly suited for a workshop where they’ll leave more fluent in digital storytelling tools.
For journalists: Minimum three years experience in journalism, three clips of previous work, a proposal for a visualization project, an organized dataset in spreadsheet form. Journalists working for mainstream media and new startups will have preference. A letter from an editor saying the visualization project will be considered for publication is a plus.
For coders: A portfolio of visualization work. A keen interest in working alongside journalists and possibly getting a job in a newsroom.
When?
We are going to put into action our final project at a workshop we organized with Matt Carroll this Sunday at the MIT Media Lab. Please, join!
Somewhere around the globe a major news story just broke. Your news crew is thousands of miles away. It will take ages to get them there and will cost a fortune.
What do you do?
News outlets need someone on the ground. Someone they can count on. Someone they can trust. Now we have a solution for them.
Thanks to an influx of new, cheap tools and growing diversity among game developers, the video game industry is experiencing a period of significant change, especially in the indie scene. Leveraging one of the medium’s primary affordances — empathy-building — games like Cart Life, Depression Quest, and Papers, Please offer us a roadmap for how journalism can use games to tell even more compelling stories. In Cart Life, you assume the role of a street vendor, living and struggling through the monotony of menial labor — and the repetitive, tiresome gameplay reflects that:
In Depression Quest, a choose-your-adventure style game, you assume the role of someone living with depression. Just like any interactive fiction game, you make choices to advance the story, but there’s one catch: to tangibly convey the emotional experience of depression, the game shows you the entire range of possible actions, but some of those options are crossed out depending on your current happiness level. The frustration a player experiences in playing Depression Quest can tell them a lot more than a simple medical description of depression.
“Dystopian document thriller” Papers, Please is a game in which you play as an immigration inspector at the border checkpoint of fictional country Arstotzka. While the gameplay is relatively basic (reviewing and stamping papers), the game effectively portrays a volatile political situation and evokes a sense of emotional toll within the player. All these affordances seem to suggest that the video game medium has the opportunity to enable new modes of journalism.
Newsrooms haven’t missed out on this — the most-trafficked New York Times story of last year was How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk, a quiz (based on real research) that asks you about what words and pronunciations you use for different things in order to identify your dialect. Mother Jones has open sourced a library that turns Google Spreadsheets into simple news quiz games. Nobody’s Facebook feed is free from the reach of the BuzzFeed quiz, a format that they continue to iterate upon.
In some ways, the newsgame seems to be the natural extension of the interactive graphic. They can be used to distill complex concepts, like BusinessWeek’s bitcoin mining minigame, what I like to think of as a game version of the explainer. Moreover, newsgames can be used to viscerally communicate real-world data, as can be seen in ProPublica’s HeartSaver, a game in which you must rush the heart attack victims of New York to nearby hospitals. Now we’re starting to get into the territory of conveying emotional experience. Similarly, The New York Times’ Gauging Your Distraction puts you behind the wheel of a car, in which you must juggle the tasks of switching lanes and texting.
While I’m still in the exploratory phase of my project, my general idea is to create some sort of newsgame design tool or toolkit to help newsrooms create games for journalism, with the hope of eliminating some of the technical hurdles that have prevented all but the most code-savvy newsrooms from dabbling in the field. My major concern with developing it as a tool is the balancing act between procedural generation/abstraction and the hand-crafted design elements that are so core to an effective game experience.
Highly procedural approaches like The Cartoonist are great in terms of lowering the technical barriers to entry for newsrooms, but the resulting games (at least the ones I have been able to read about or watch online) seem pretty reductive, as the engine generates games based on user-defined relationships and verbs. Another approach would be to anticipate a few key narrative frames and having those directly translate into corresponding gameplay elements. With any of these approaches, repetitiveness between the resulting games seems to be a major problem — even if the theming/artwork has been changed, players will easily recognize that they are playing the same game.
With these concerns in mind, it seems like I will focus on a more generalized tool — perhaps repurposing an existing engine like Twine specifically for the newsroom, or creating tools for playful interactive experiences (but not full “games” per se) like quizzes. The project might even take the form of a design toolkit to help newsrooms through the process of conceptualizing a newsgame. I will be talking to the MIT Game Lab and other game developers to further define the scope of the project; it will also be important to get feedback from newsrooms looking to develop games and what sorts of stories they see coming out of this. Finally, I welcome any suggestions and feedback from all of you in terms of where to take this project.
