Knight Fellow Geoff McGhee created this polished video documentary series about how data visualization is infiltrating and transforming journalism. Interviews with Many Eyes creators Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, Amanda Cox of the New York Times, and other dataviz luminaries are coupled with bios and links to further information, some history of visualization techniques, industry context (is dataviz profitable? who's doing it?) and lots of lovely examples. The last section of the video, "First Steps," is a mini-tour of useful DIY sites like Swivel and Wordle (which is ridiculously easy to use, but has gotten me props many times at work), annotated with links to tutorials, statistics help, and some great dataviz blogs. McGhee's documentary is well worth watching for anyone into new ways of seeing and sharing data.
I've embedded the complete video below the fold for linky convenience, but I highly recommend that if you can, you click through and watch it at its Stanford host site, where it's broken into a series of short, coffee-break friendly clips within a clean, annotated navigation interface (shown in the screenshot above), or if you prefer, you can download it as a video podcast. I should also note that CJR has compiled a post with further information useful for aspiring data visualizers, including several more tutorials, Q&As, and links to help forums and online tools.
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