Abstract
Interaction and visualization together yield an interesting, fruitful, and promising combination for producing content in digital news media. In an era in which the press no longer exclusively provides the news, interaction and visualization combined in innovative products for the public are powerful value propositions for the media. Together, they are capable of winning readers’ loyalty and engagement, both of which are crucial for the media’s sustainability. In this work, we present a review of the literature and formulate the theoretical bases for this binomial pairing and its main components, which, we argue, should be available to citizens, the interests of whom journalism must defend if it aspires to be viable.
Keywords
Interactive visualizations; Digital journalism; Cyberjournalism; Online media; InfoVis; Digital media; Interactive documentary; Journalistic innovation; Interactive storytelling
Introduction: the binomial of interaction and visualization, a successful pairing
On 23 March 2020, just a few days after the WHO declared the world Covid-19 pandemic, Navid Mamoon and Gabriel Rasskin, two students from Carnegie Mellon University, launched CovidVisualizer, an interactive visualization application for practically real-time consultation, using a 3D recreation of the globe, of the number of Covid-19 victims and people affected in every country in the world (Figure 1). In just a few weeks it had 70 million users. CovidViualizer is just one of numerous interfaces (Jacob, 2020; Cascón-Katchadourian, 2020; Pérez-Montoro, 2021) that have been created to facilitate understanding and with which to consult the statistical data constantly being recorded about the pandemic.
Its success is the result of its authors’ skill in designing a device that efficiently combines visualization and interaction. Interactivity, in other words, enables users to explore maps and to establish their own visual narrative. The media, national agencies and research centres have used interactive resources to construct a narrative of the epidemic with a focus on the aspects about it that are considered most significant (Danielson, 2020). They have offset biased information (Bowe; Simmons; Mattern, 2020) and used visualizations as models with which to forecast the pandemic’s evolution (Chen et al., 2020), often revealing how hard it is to standardize and to validate sources of information (Ferrer-Sapena et al., 2020).
Pairing interactivity and visualization as a binomial enhances the media’s credibility and increases engagement with users, as it places them at the core of processes of access, dialogue, and relation with data through interfaces (McKenna et al., 2017; Pérez-Montoro; Freixa, 2018).
Thus, for example, in social communication, in contrast with traditional media in which the text of an article of journalism might have told a story using graphs and images to back it up or to endorse what was being narrated, these no longer play such a secondary role in new digital media. Because of their interactive nature, these visual products now occupy a predominant place in telling a story (Pérez-Montoro, 2018). That, at least, is the aspiration of media such as The New York Times, the 2020 targets of which included improving visuals in reports and exploring new dynamics of audience interaction (Leonhardt et al., 2017).
Recognizing the core significance of interaction and visualization in increasingly rich and complex information processes allows for reappraisal of both the practices and the systems that we establish for them to take place. The digital ecosystem has generated its own dynamics that call into question the relationships established among information, what is perceived as narrative, the curation of diverse contents and forms of access, consumption, and participation. It also makes it possible to explore what roles the agents who interact and engage with information should, can or are required to play: journalists, documentalists, information curators, audiences, researchers, informing communities, media, and receiving society (Freixa; Pérez-Montoro; Codina, 2020). Emphasizing the core significance of pairing interaction and visualization also raises questions about how digital text, in a broad sense, is defined, designed, produced, consumed and analysed: multimedia, mutable, modifiable and transmedia.
Use of interactive visualizations in the media has become common practice. They have been consolidated largely be-cause of the standardization both of their formats and of their development, which is a factor that has allowed for a reduction in production costs and more widespread use in newsrooms, as simplification of proces-ses has facilitated their application by edi-tors and journalists who do not have spe-cific training in programming or interaction design.
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Source: Editorial of the special issue (Freixa, Pérez-Montoro, Codina 2021)
Access to full document
Editorial
The binomial of interaction and visualization in digital news media: consolidation, standardization and future challenges [abstract and download]
Pere Freixa, Mario Pérez-Montoro, Lluís Codina
Artículo traducido al español:
El binomio interacción y visualización en medios digitales: afianzamiento, estandarización y retos de futuro [resumen y enlace de descarga]
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Jesús Díaz-Campo, Francisco Segado-Boj, Erika Fernández-Gómez
Discussion, news information, and research sharing on social media at the onset of Covid-19 [resumen]
Hyejin Park, J. Patrick Biddix, Han Woo Park
Sharenting y derechos digitales de los niños y adolescentes [resumen]
Ana Azurmendi, Cristina Etayo, Angelina Torrell
Study on the perception of South Korean librarians of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the strategy to support libraries [resumen]
Younghee Noh
Data governance for public transparency [resumen]
Agustí Cerrillo-Martínez, Anahí Casadesús-de-Mingo
What are political parties doing on TikTok? The Spanish case [resumen y enlace de descarga]
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Sufro una grave enfermedad rara. Reto a cantar y hacer coreografías en TikTok [resumen]
Sebastián Sánchez-Castillo, María-Teresa Mercado-Sáez
El año que nos volvimos insostenibles: Análisis de la producción española en Sustainability (2020) [resumen y enlace de descarga]
Rafael Repiso, Adoración Merino-Arribas, Álvaro Cabezas-Clavijo
Fuentes informativas en tiempos de Covid-19: Cómo los medios en Chile narraron la pandemia a través de sus redes sociales [resumen]
Claudia Mellado, Luis Cárcamo-Ulloa, Amaranta Alfaro, Darla Inai, José Isbej
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Blanca Rodríguez-Bravo, Andrés Fernández-Ramos, Marta De-la-Mano, Marina Vianello-Osti
Artículo traducido al español:
Evolución y renovación del big deal: una revisión desde la perspectiva de las bibliotecas [resumen y enlace de descarga]
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El documental inmersivo: comprender el fenómeno en los relatos de no ficción a través de una propuesta de tipología [resumen]
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Raquel Escandell-Poveda, Mar Iglesias-García, Natalia Papí-Gálvez
Artículo traducido al español:
¿Quién hace SEO en España? Metodología cibermétrica para la construcción de universos de empresas [resumen y enlace de descarga]
Media crisis and disinformation: the participation of digital newspapers in the dissemination of a denialist hoax [resumen y enlace de descarga]
Lorena Cano-Orón, Dafne Calvo, Germán Llorca-Abad, Rosanna Mestre-Pérez
Artículo traducido al español:
Crisis de los medios y desinformación: participación de los diarios digitales en la difusión de un bulo negacionista [resumen y enlace de descarga]
Crisis communication in audiovisual format: information from Spain’s National Health System on YouTube in 2020 [resumen y enlace de descarga]
Sara Loiti-Rodríguez, Aingeru Genaut-Arratibel, María-José Cantalapiedra-González
Artículo traducido al español:
Comunicación de crisis en formato audiovisual: la información sanitaria del Sistema Nacional de Salud de España en YouTube en 2020 [resumen y enlace de descarga]
El mercado del vídeo en streaming: un análisis de la estrategia de Disney+ [resumen]
Francisco Vacas-Aguilar
Indicadores / Indicators
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Vicente P. Guerrero-Bote, Henk F. Moed, Félix De-Moya-Anegón
The Shanghai Global Ranking of Academic Subjects: Room for improvement [resumen y enlace de descarga]
Erwin Krauskopf