Peering Into the Data Divide: Part I
Peering Into the Data Divide is a mini-series of conversations between Zameena and her peers about their individual processes of learning interactive journalism and, in turn, closing the data divide that many journalists convince themselves they can’t get over.
First up is first-semester student Kathryn Casteel, who will give us a glance at how she’s handling the interactive fundamentals class and what it’s taught her so far.
Kathryn Casteel (’16)
Hometown: Spartanburg, South Carolina
Concentration: Business & Economics
Fun fact: loves cats
ZM: What have you most enjoyed about our interactive class so far?
KC: I honestly love the entire class because I love getting to take a story and make it visual. I think visual components to a written story can make it more compelling, especially when dealing with numbers. I have Lam Vo as my instructor, and she’s amazing. She’s really energetic, and always seems excited to show us the wonderful world that is data journalism so it makes the class interesting.
ZM: I hear a certain publication has already reached out to you to help them with their graphics. Can you tell me a little more about that?
KC: During the career fair I showed [a representative from] Schneps Communications my work for class because I’m interesting in pursing interactive journalism for the rest of my time at CUNY, so I wanted to go ahead and start selling myself as someone who is interested in that type of work. They were really interested in getting me to make some infographics for them just by what they saw in my class work. They actually emailed me the next day.
I recently created a graphic for The Queens Courier about the Mets and Royals in the World Series. We all know how heavy the work load is for J-school as it stands, so it was a little difficult to find the time to find data about baseball that would make an interesting graphic and design something as quickly as they wanted it, but getting published work definitely makes the stress worth it.
ZM: Why do you think learning interactive journalism is important?
KC: I think it’s potentially one of the most important courses we could take as up and coming journalist. One of the most important things that we can do right now in j-school is learn to adapt to the different mediums and ways of telling stories, and for that reason I think creating graphics and interactive visuals will only continue to become a more in demand skill in our job market.
ZM: Can you give an example of a piece of interactive journalism that you really like?
KC: I really like this graphic that Bloomberg did about finding out what government programs cost more than others. Buzzfeed quizzes are already a guilty pleasure, but this is nice because it’s informative, plus it’s really well done, interactive, and responsive. Buzzfeed quizzes are set up as question/answer interactivity, but this quiz is interactive before you even select an answer. The design is also more advanced.
ZM: Can you show me an example of one piece you’ve created in the interactive fundamentals class and describe how you made it?
KC: I made this map of asthma hospitalization rates for children for an assignment using CartoDB. I chose this topic because my beat for Craft is Mott Haven [a community in the Bronx], and I already know there are high rates for asthma there, so I was interested to see how that compares to the rest of NYC. I found the data pretty easily on NYC Open Data, but figuring out the shapefiles was a little difficult. It takes a lot of playing around to get this kind of stuff right when it comes to finding shapefiles and figuring out how to make them connect to show the information, but eventually when I figured it out I was able to make a pretty nice map.
Interested in being featured in the Peering Into the Data Divide mini-series? Submit your request over at http://bit.ly/cdjsubmissions.
