Last night I finished writing the draft of Nerd Journalism, my PhD dissertation. Now I need to spend the next 30 days or so editing the damn thing. I want to submit it at the end of January, and I'll try to defend it over the Summer.
I'll release the entire book as a free PDF in www.nerdjournalism.com, probably after July 2017. I'll also publish around 30 video interviews, along with their transcripts, and the data collected from the Malofiej International Infographics awards, which covers around 20 years of the competition. Besides those, my other source was observations conducted at ProPublica and at Univisión News online.
The goal of this project is to explore the changes news information graphics have experienced in the past two decades. One of them is the kind of graphics visual journalists favor. In the past, they were mostly pictorial/figurative explanations and descriptions, and their central elements used to be illustrations, photographs, locator maps, etc. In the present, abstract representations of data are much more common.
With the help of some students I put together a spreadsheet of nearly 2,000 winners of the Malofiej awards, quantifying their country of origin, the publication where they appeared, and also the elements they included: Illustrations, graphs, charts, maps of different kinds, etc. Then, we also identified which of those elements had a more dominant place in the composition.
Let me show you a few graphs, even if I still need to verify and copy-edit their content.