20/04/2009

Mantras: Alberto Cairo

The teacher at Chapell Hill opens a new chapter about the Peter Sullivan (in spanish). Maybe we agree or not with him, but some sentences are clear:

"The problem, which is also a big problem of the journalism infographics from its beginnings, comes when the aesthetic ambition comes before than our main targets as communicators: to make easy the comprehension and exploration of the data, to be trustworthy, to have rigor, to be accurate. Don't let the technical matters be a barrier between message and reader, but a channel to drive the first on to the second one."

Other make you think:

"We can have an invasion of visual shocking styles the next months, after having inside the message that the fashion now is to treat data on the most complicated ways if we have an excuse to use some last generation tool"

And some to have on our walls:

"We can't forget who are we talking to when we work at a general information newspaper or magazine: not to specialized audiences with a solid knowledge of the codes used to show the data, but to different kinds people. We've to challenge them, yes, and not to talk to them as fools ("my reader doesn't understand dispersion diagrams": nonsenses), but we can't go too far too fast"

To explain his ideas he gives two great examples of what is right: soldiers dead in Irak and the inmigration data.

The complete article for you, in spanish...

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