IDV460

Interactive Data Viz Spring 16

The syllabus

Welcome to IDV460

Spurred by technology,the media landscape has changed dramatically, and irreversibly, in the 21st Century. The difference in a news organization between 2000 and 2016 is far greater than the difference between the same organization between 1900 and 1990 (the year Tim Berners-Lee created the first browser for his nascent World Wide Web). We now live firmly and almost-constantly in the Information Age, with more than 3 billion Internet users worldwide. The average American, according to a recent Nielsen study, owns four digital devices and spends 60 hours a week consuming content across those devices. Most news organizations — newspapers, TV stations, magazines — have adopted a “digital-first” philosophy, and fewer than 10 percent of Americans rely on so-called legacy media as their primary news source. This represents a huge challenge to the industry, and to the potential graduates of a journalism program, but it also presents unique and exciting opportunities. For technology provides enormous possibilities to harness the power of computing to report and present the news. No area has been more affected by this upheaval than the world of visual journalism. Change has become the only constant, and the pace of change is rapid indeed.

Six years ago, when I first taught Infographics at what was then the IU School of Journalism, I combined print and interactive graphics projects into the same course. At the time, there was an industry-standard approach to interactive graphics on the Web — a GUI program called Flash, which was (and is) produced by Adobe. It featured timeline-based editing and its own programming language: ActionScript 3.0. (Many higher-end users of this program eschewed the timeline completely.) Students in my class produced print versions of three projects (a charts package, a map and an explanatory diagram) and then, after each project, built an interactive version in Flash, incorporating buttons, animation and dynamic content. Creating graphics in this program was fun, it was challenging, and within a few months, it was virtually obsolete.

So what was the problem with Flash?

From its early days, Adobe Flash was in conflict with the basic principles of web development. Steve Jobs himself explains this in detail in his notorious open letter of 2010, in which he outlined the reasons Apple would not allow Flash on its mobile devices — the iPhone, iPad and iPod. In essence, Jobs argued that Flash was:

A year later, when Apple officially pulled the plug on its efforts to develop a Flash Player plugin for mobile browsers, the writing was on the wall. Mobile Internet usage began to outstrip fixed internet usage a couple of years ago, and there will be no return to the era of the desktop or laptop computer. (Not that those products will simply cease to exist, of course. But try this informal survey: compare the amount of time you spend each week using the Internet on your phone vs. your laptop. See?)

Adobe Flash still exists — if you have the full suite of Creative Cloud programs on your own machine (which you should, as an IU student), you have it. The application continues to be heavily used by game developers, but it is no longer the industry standard for creating interactive graphics. What has taken its place, and the way in which this kind of work will be created in the future, is a primary focus of this course (or at least of its more technical aspects).