Really smart thoughts on the future of storytelling

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Angela Dice

For a couple months now, I’ve been following with great interest a question posted on the Q&A site Quora.com. For those who haven’t seen the site before, often very smart people from a variety of industries (though, as with many new sites often from the tech world) ask and thoughtfully answer questions.

This summer, someone posted the following question:

How will the craft of storytelling change in the future?
The The Internet, human-computer interaction, gaming, and other future technologies leading up to the possibility of the technological singularity, will change how stories are told, how they are heard. How will the craft of storytelling change, and how can novelists, filmmakers, television producers and game designers adapt?

The answers have ranged from strong defense of a narrative structure that will never die to thoughts from a robotics and game designer on the ways artificial intelligence, automation and robotics could change the reader/viewer’s experience as well as the storyteller’s craft.

They’re well worth a read.

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Link Share: When to Do Data Journalism

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Angela Dice

For the past few years, journalists have increasingly talked about how better to integrate data. Often with stories culled from spreadsheets come interactive databases and with them an increase that important website metric: engagement.

Data journalism, though means an awful lot. It can mean finding the biggest, highest, lowest, smallest of something using a dataset or it can be a more complex process of finding patterns or changes over time and geography.

Deciding what data to use and just how interesting it is can be one of the more difficult tasks of using data. And spending time to do that — and the occasional consequence that the numbers you’re looking at just aren’t that interesting — can be difficult, particularly when resources are scarce.

Mac Slocum at one of O’Reilly Media’s blogs had a useful Q&A with the editor of the UK Guardian’s Datablog. They discuss what the Guardian does with the data before it’s turned into a story. The Guardian also has a blog post on the subject and this infographic about its workflow:

Data journalism workflow on Prezi

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Maps + Data = Love

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Angela Dice

Let’s get this out of the way:  If I see a story with an interactive map, I’m probably going to click the hell out of it. They are the shiny things that often distracts me.

Census data, school data, disaster data often make for terrific interactive maps, but until recently I wasn’t (well, I’m still not) particularly good at making them. My early attempts were time-consuming and not always the prettiest things. But sometimes, “good enough” is just what you have to go with, and I was determined to make something at least partly by myself. With the help of a co-worker programmer, I learned how to upload a KML file into Google Earth and manually color in the polygons and edit each talk box individually.

This is the serviceable gem that took about three hours to make and tweak:


View Kitsap Ferry Commuters in a larger map

I showed a poor co-worker how to do that, and he ended up making a map for all 39 counties in Washington that way.

I’d heard of Google Fusion Tables, but didn’t get how to get geographic shapes in.

Enter this great post on Poynter from WNYC’s John Keefe: Journalist’s guide to mapping data by county, district using ShpEscape

If you want to make a data map, go read it. I didn’t have a story for which I needed to use it right away, so I just played around using (what else?) school data, and here’s what I did with it:

I found the school district shape file where I’m likely to find most of the shapefiles I use, on the U.S. Census website, where they’re referred to as TIGER/Line Shapefiles.

To get data, I headed to the data download page for Washington’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. Data by school district also is easy to look up on the National Center for Education Statistics website.

I’ll not be able to list all the problems you might encounter when creating one of these, but I can tell you where I hit snags. Thankfully, Kimberly Rubenstein, news editor at Kitsap Sun, also has been playing with Fusion Tables and was able to help me figure a few things out.

Once I had the files uploaded and merged, I went to visualize a map of the information and I found that some school districts (big ones like Seattle and Tacoma schools) were vacant spaces on my map with no data in the information boxes. It turns out that the names OSPI and Census used were not the same. For example, in one table, there was no period after the “M” in the Mary M. Knight School District in Mason County. They don’t settle for anything less than exact matches. Picky, picky.

It’s a reminder to double-check the cells you’re comparing or use uniquely numbered identifiers whenever possible.

Luckily, I found that by updating the original tables (the ones I’d merged together), my new Fusion Table also updated and vice versa. You can edit column names by clicking “Modify Columns” in the Edit menu of the table.

To color the shapes, you have to click “Configure Styles” and choose the Fill Color option under Polygons. You can clean up what appears in the info boxes by clicking “Configure Info Window” to limit what is shown in the boxes.

And below is the final result. The map shows school districts by percentage of students who receive free or reduced lunches, essentially tracking the rate of poverty of students in the districts. Click on a district to see its percentage.

My next map-creation goal will be to use try using filters and animating data sets on a map, because the only thing niftier than an interactive map is one that also has a timeline. If you know of any good resources, please point me to them or share your own interactive maps.

UPDATE: After tweeting out this blog post and a thanks, John Keefe suggested using this method to get rid of the parts of the tracts that extend into the water. Covering a county surrounded on three sides by water, the tip is much, much appreciated.

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What makes that story so good?

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Angela Dice

“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. ”
— Ira Glass

To write well, as many know, you need to read good things, and a lot of them. But sometimes, just reading that killer story or book isn’t enough. You know it’s fantastic, it presents some “aha moment,” allows you to see through a subject’s eyes or was just so enjoyable to read, you didn’t realize you’d learned a whole heck of a lot.

So how did the writer do it? While sometimes a story’s greatness can be easy to pinpoint, that isn’t always the case.

Which is why I’ve become so fond of Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s this so good?” feature. A group of editors writers dissect components of classic narrative nonfiction pieces. So far, they’ve taken on pieces by Truman Capote, John McPhee and W.C. Heinz. In a similar vein, a group of noteworthy editors take a look at contemporary newspaper and magazine articles in Nieman’s monthly Editor’s Roundtable. Following that, they post a Q&A with the writer.

For those still stuck in the gap, in addition to doing a lot more work, Nieman’s features are well worth a look.

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New book offers advice on telling stories with data

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Angela Dice

Something that may be worth checking out: A new book, “Visualize This” by Nathan Yau, a PhD candidate in Statistics at UCLA and blogger at flowingdata.com, promises to be a practical guide for creating graphics. It appears to be geared to those who want to create their own interactive graphics from designing them in Illustrator to using javascript to make them interactive online.

It appears to offer advice on ways to analyze and visualize data.

Here’s a promo video about the book:

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Bridging the gap between ‘writers’ and digital journalists

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Angela Dice

On PBS Mediashift, Gary Moskowitz looks at what seems to be his student journalists want to write more than they want to use other mediums to tell stories.

Toward the end, he makes this observation,

“Since we, as online journalism instructors, focus on instruments of technology rather than artful prose, there’s an element of confusion among students as to what online journalism really is. Is it journalism, or is it technology? For many, the combination of both is jarring, and bridging the gap between the two is a struggle, especially for aspiring writers.”

For a few hundred years, the medium, aside from personal conversation, that has best accomplishes the exchange of ideas has been the written word. We are taught that beginning in kindergarten. It is the vehicle by which we are taught to improve our critical thinking and comprehension skills, learn about character and other elements of story development.

It’s no wonder, then, that people who desire to share information that either emotionally resonates with readers or calls them to action turn to the written word.

As programmers, photographers, videographers and graphic artists can tell you, stories told using other mediums can tell those powerful stories too.

But instructors, (and in retrospect, I as a web editor) should understand that this often is a dizzying and sometimes induces a feeling of hopelessness.

Working journalists are being asked how to know how to shoot and edit video (even if only in a rudimentary fashion), shoot photos, at least write basic HTML and CSS (if not also javascript and for the data-minded, php), understand the art of graphics to create informational and useful data visualizations, which comes with more basic journalism skills of properly knowing how to analyze data. Plus, you’ll have to know intricacies of a beat.

Without years of background using these mediums, many storytellers are likely going to need more than a few classes are going to provide. That’s problematic if, as Moskowitz describes, there is little time to teach both writing and all these other skills.

It takes time to understand different ways of thinking, such as visual or computational thinking, and to understand which mediums can best tell different aspects of a story.
To do so, they’ll need to become comfortable enough with these tools to understand their possibilities.

Perhaps the way today’s journalistic skills are taught needs to be re-examined. Is there a way multiple medium storytelling can be integrated into all journalism classes? Can an ethics or stats course also include data analyzation with visualization? I’m guessing this is done in some places, and I’d love to know where. Can a discussion about character development and writing profiles also include lessons on audio editing and video editing that same interview?

Additionally, students surely could benefit if journalism departments could regularly team up with other departments, bringing in computer programmers, scientists or other data analysts, graphic artists, to partner on projects.

I don’t think bridging the gap is impossible. I think it requires allowing aspiring writers to shift their focus into being good storytellers and taking all those writing skills they have or want to develop and showing simultaneously how it can be done in other mediums. You have to go beyond treating digital journalism as its own thing.

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The ‘messy’ creative mind

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Angela Dice

I ran across this video interview with New Yorker writer and “The Tipping Point” author Malcolm Gladwell. This is part of his answer to the question, “What advice do you have for aspiring writers?”

I don’t think he’s trying to say that you need to be messy all the time, but rather that it’s OK to embrace a little chaos in a world that is constantly forcing us to organize the floods of information and ideas coming our way. A little distraction, forcing yourself to confront the uncomfortable can spark ideas.

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This American Life’s Ira Glass on Storytelling

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Angela Dice

I’m not shy about saying it: I idolize Ira Glass. That now cliché anecdote you hear in public radio pledge drives about sitting in your car in a parking lot until a story ends: that’s me and This American Life.

In some ways, the show represents a paragon of storytelling. The stories somehow seem so simple and yet so compelling. On a recent talk in Seattle, Ira Glass said the formula was relatively simple: action, action, action, reflective thought. Oh, and tossing out about half of all of your ideas that don’t work out. So simple to say, but in doing and sometimes reading stories you realize that there has to be a little more to it.

Well, it turns out he’s elaborated on it a bit in several videos aimed at beginning storytellers:

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News Article vs. Story

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Angela Dice

Steve Buttry posted some interesting thoughts today on newspaper articles, which some like digital/social media commentator Jeff Jarvis has deemed mostly outmoded, and stories.

From Buttry’s post, an article is something more akin to a collection of facts:

Even before newspapers’ business model began to collapse under the force of digital disruption, we learned that many articles worked as well or better as graphics or tables, organizing those facts with a better structure for their content than the paragraph.

vs.

A story is not constructed simply as a string of information. It has a narrative arc. It is built around those story elements we learned in 8th grade: plot, character, setting, theme. It uses literary devices such as dialogue, action and scenes. It has a conflict and a resolution (or at least a quest for resolution, since so many journalism stories are not yet finished). It builds to a climax.

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Finding ways to tell truly interactive stories

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Angela Dice

One of the early goals that caused me to leave a full-time newspaper web editing job was a desire to become a better storyteller by a) reporting on more stories and b) to eventually go back to school and study it more.

When I tell people about my desire to go back to school, they often ask what practical skill I intend to learn and I feel often shy with an answer that in the purely practical sense is insufficient: to study writing and storytelling hopefully with some multimedia components to it. It’s a little hard to explain sometimes because it’s not just that I sometimes want to write stories, sometimes make videos and sometimes shoot photos (though that’s OK too.) What I eventually want to do is create stories that are fully interactive yet immersive/engaging experiences with components that don’t just retell a story or are an interesting aside, but are an integral part of it. I guess you could call it writer/multimedia director.

There aren’t many examples of this out there, both because I haven’t found them and because it’s a relatively nascent field. Sure, there are eBooks, books with flippable pages or very pretty moving illustrations, very cool reference books

Recently, though, I’ve come across a couple of pretty interesting examples of books created for the iPad that really put into practice what I’m talking about and make me exclaim, “I want to do that.”

The most recent is a creation from programmers Push Pop Press, who have taken Al Gore’s sequel to “An Inconvenient Truth” and turned it into an interactive piece with enlargeable photos, infographics and an hour’s worth of video documentary. Of course, it’s not the first interactive book out there. Folks like Electronic Publisher (and, most interestingly, the group is working on a tool for publishers to create their own books):

The above example, though, is just a start (though a very pretty start). What it seems to lack, though, are social components that for example let you talk about a piece of the book with other readers and friends.

Though I haven’t read it for myself, it seems to be a great textbook style format. What I additionally hope for, though, are digital books that can weave together media in such a way that it helps to creates something closer to a narrative. Something that adds depth to the characters in a story, such as video tidbits, Tweets or blogposts from a person as you’re reading a story that gives you a little more insight. How you do that without distracting from the narrative still is something I don’t yet know how to do.

Perhaps the answer is or at least is akin to video game style storytelling:

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