*This image was taken from the lecture about data journalism in action at the London Olympics (referenced at the end)
This lecture was all about data journalism, what it is, its history and its use in something like the Olympics. The key definition here is that data journalism is telling a story using data to bolster your argument or point of view. The point of data journalism is to tell a story in a way that will keep the reader entertained. The good thing about data journalism is that it can (to a degree) take opinions out of the news and leave you with cold hard facts. There is almost always something to do with data in most stories. Now data journalism is just journalism because people don’t trust reporters anymore, they need to bolster their arguments through data.
There is a myth that data journalism did not exist before 2009, that is not true. Data journalism has been used ever since the first issue of the guardian back in the 1800’s. It has always been a part of the news, it has just been recently popularised. Even just using text and simple lines could be considered an effective data visualisation. These data visualisations have often been used to explain things about war to the public.
The Olympics are a good example of data visualisation. Everyone wants to know who is the best, using medal tables. But this data may not tell the whole story. If this data was corrected against things like GDP or population what effect would that have on the medal tally? A visualisation like this was made by the Guardian for the 2012 Olympics. It allowed people to interrogate the data themselves and it could be updated in real time.
The most important point in here though is the speed a data visualisation can now be produced at. This speed was not available 20 or 30 years ago while now we can do them fast and they can be updated in real time, they are not fixed which is a great asset to have when covering something ongoing, like the Olympic medal tables.
References
Data journalism in action: the London Olympics. (2016). YouTube. Retrieved 15 October 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyjBJzigm0w
History of Data Journalism at The Guardian. (2016). YouTube. Retrieved 15 October 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIa5EoxyvZI
What is data journalism at The Guardian?. (2016). YouTube. Retrieved 15 October 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBOhZn28TsE
Data Visualisation 