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Comment by jonesb6 | Hacker News Reader

"this course was meant to be on interactive data visualization"

So the best way to do this was to teach journalism students how to program, how to program for the web, how to program with javascript, how to program with third party libraries, and finally how to program with the third-party library d3.js?

I feel like this is just an extension of the thought process "everyone should learn to program because learning to program makes your life better".

I sincerely appreciate the write-up and will definitely be coming back to this blog next week to see the students work.

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Ignoring how important interactive web visualization has become to journalism (fivethirtyeight, NYT, Economist, etc), its very difficult to claim a university level course which likely is an elective or has alternative courses can be prescriptivist. This seems like an extension of the thought process "we should make opportunities and tools available to people if said tools can help them" and I'm glad people are doing that.

I agree with general sentiment that teaching journalists programming is not a realistic option - not only is it time consuming, but might also simply not workout for people who chose to be journalists. It is a humanitarian area of knowledge, after all, not technical. Of course, some might have affinity with programming, but generally speaking (from my experience at least) young journalists won't appreciate the idea of extra class where they have to learn programming.

However I believe infographics and data visualization specifically are important when trying to convey densely-packed information so it has to be taught journalists in some form. They should know that given some data they can pick certain type of visualization that would work well within the article.

I think some general course on data visualization without jumping into programming would work fine - explain what data visualization is, how it is done, what kinds of data could be used with it, what kinds of representations of data are available and so on. Plus share some resources where people can view various visualization samples.

I like it because it gives the journalists a vocabulary and a firm sense of what can be done, even if it ends up being assigned to someone else for implementation.

Math is hard, yet we require everyone to learn basic math in school. Programming is hard too, but there is a fair case to be made that it too should be part of the basic curriculum. Just like with math, most people don't have the talent or drive to reach a high level of skill in programming, but it would still be valuable for almost everyone to learn the basics.

I think you are underestimating the importance of a shared understanding of technical possibilities. Even if those people are not going to use visualizations in their own daily work (and almost all won't), it still enables them to reason about it much more creatively and communicate what they would like to see with their more spezialized colleagues. For example, the NY Times website has shown a stunning amount of great visualization in recent years. This might not have been possible without the people who tell the stories being able to imagine how to combine it with visual additions.

I think this is something that goes beyond the combination of journalism and visualization. It's literally like learning a common language.

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