A Visualization Course for Journalism Students

Abstract

Visualization as a means to communicate information relevant to society in a visual form has become more and more important in the recent years. As the prior medium has changed from print to online media, writers of online articles and bloggers regularly serve their readers with interactive visual interfaces that give intuitive insights into the discussed topics. The change of how information is brought to the public and the large scale of digital information available have also changed teaching contents of journalists who learn aspects of data processing and representation. This year, 21 journalism students participated in my interdisciplinary visualization course. This paper reflects on theoretical course contents, conducted student projects and the feedback of journalism students on how a visualization course could be modified to perfectly fit the needs of becoming data journalists.