Shan Carter on Storytelling at the NYT

Shan Carter, Interactive graphic editor at the The New York Times, talks about his work telling stories with data. The presentation entitled: “How I tried for years to find the perfect form for interactive graphics, how I failed, and why, whether a perfect form exists or not, I’ve stopped my desperate pursuit.”, walks through some of the best NYT’s examples of interactive data journalism.

Shan Carter at Data Vis Meetup from sha on Vimeo.

The essential question is how best to present data and tell stories using different levels of interactivity. As part of this, he discusses a number of New York Times visualizations with differing levels of user interaction:

Essentially, what he really wants is:

Something that does statistical analysis, has approachable storytelling and has useful and judicious interactivity

He goes on to say the questions we should ask about data visualizations are: ‘Is it surprising? Is it heartfelt? Does it make me laugh? Our goal is not to make great visualizations, but to communicate with human beings.’

(via FlowingData)

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