Interactive graphics should be prominent in multimedia curricula

By Jennifer A. Palilonis, Ball State University

After talking to a number of people from across the country at the AEJMC convention this year, I realized just how many of us are developing new courses that focus on multimedia and cross-platform storytelling. Of course, anytime we rethink curriculum, it’s a trick to balance the foundations of good journalism, more software and technical training, and how to determine what tomorrow’s journalists need to be successful.

In my own work, one question keeps arising: How much should students specialize in one form of storytelling and how much should they know about the others? We can’t train everyone to be experts at everything. But these days, they certainly need to be more versatile than ever before. As the journalism graphics sequence coordinator at Ball State, I have had the opportunity to teach a number of digital storytelling courses, and I have also engaged in research on how informational graphics can be used in multimedia news packages. And it seems to me that while many educators have begun to focus on teaching writers about video and photographers about audio, most have been slower to expose all journalism students to information graphics reporting.

Perhaps this is because in the past, graphics reporting has required high-end illustration skills, and animation has required deep knowledge of programs like Adobe Flash. Or perhaps it’s because we are unaware of how rich graphics reporting can be as a multimedia story form. So let me share two thoughts that might help move this forward at your schools.

First, we can, and should, train all journalism students to be aware of and know how to use all of the different storytelling tools available to them. As we all try to navigate the changing media landscape, I think we should consider whether our courses/curricula include how conceptualize, research, illustrate, animate and edit multimedia graphics to make our students more versatile, well-rounded journalists. Specifically, there are a few types of graphics you might want to consider exposing students to in the future. Instructives allow a user to click through the steps of a process and explain how something happens or works. Narratives offer a vicarious experience by combining audio voiceover with rich animation. Simulations and games are usually a representation of real-word phenomena and are also highly immersive. And data visualizations combine data sets with interactive maps, charts and diagrams. Although they are based on hard numbers, data visualizations can often be beautiful and creative. In the very least, students should be aware of these story forms, as well as when and how to use them.

Second, Interactive visual storytelling tools are maturing quickly. In fact, there are a number of open source tools available that make it easier to create sophisticated graphics with little to no knowledge of illustration techniques or programming. For example, GeoCommons (http://geocommons.com/) allows users to upload data and merge it with several types of map files. Maps that once required specialized skills to produce, can be created and shared online in minutes. Likewise, tools like Many Eyes (http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/) and Protovis (http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/) do the same for complex charts and data visualizations. Suddenly, any journalist can churn out a visual representation of a data set in minutes.

Of course, some students will illustrate and program graphics, while others will only be able to brainstorm graphics potential and use open source tools to create visualizations. Regardless, we should be addressing information graphics in our multimedia courses because if we don’t, we are severely limiting the number of tools our students are equipped to make use of in their work.