Week 10

This week I took on the project in which Jake Stokes interviewed a group of journalists from different countries about censorship. As I could not reach Stokes, I decided to contact directly the journalists who he interviewed, to ask for their photos myself. I also contacted the Egyptian journalist to ask her about the reason she wanted to use an alias instead of her real name. In the end, I could not include the Vietnamese journalist’s answers, due to her personal concerns.
By the end of the week, I was half way done in my Flash project of the interviews. That is how it will look on its first page in my draft version.

I also edited the photo for the front page story and published the story on the Web site, which used to be Brian Schraum’s weekly task in the spring semester.

http://www.globaljournalist.org/stories/2009/05/21/a-show-of-strength/
RESEARCH
I did the pre-test of my survey. Mark Lewis’s comment summarized the opinions of most of those who tried the survey: “You need to start the experiment with a page of instructions. I didn't know what I was supposed to do. Am I supposed to be reading stories? Something along the lines of: this is an experiment testing the user effects of advertising placement. It will take you through a series of Web pages, each followed by a short questionnaire. Please take a minute or two to look over each Web site. You may quit at any time. Also, the next button is a little hard to find. You may want to do something to make it more obvious. I had to look for it. “

The other friends who helped me test the survey were caught by surprise by the fact that the survey took them to an outside Web site, when they clicked Next.
I followed Lewis’s advice in adding a page of instruction and changed the color of the button Next on my Web sites to red, so that it will attract attention. This is what I have after the changes. I will ask some other people to run the survey to make sure that it is as user-friendly as possible.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=bP_2blR_2f2MQRi7GvsVry2H1g_3d_3d

Week 9

This week, I updated the map for the World Watch section.
I also recreated the maps of Italy and Tunisia, using the data sets from the Web site which I found last week. I was not happy with my earlier versions, as they were too simplistic and felt that I needed to make them look better.




I tried to draw the map of Mumbai to add to the map of India in the article about Mumbai terrorist attacks, but failed, as the data I had about the areas of Greater Mumbai were confusing and not reliable. There are borders for certain areas but there are no names for them, and I had a hard time guessing what these areas were from the maps of Mumbai I could find on the Web. I will get back to this if I manage to get hold of better data.
I created maps of the United Arab Emirates,Iraq, and Bolivia for the articles about these countries. With the new data sets, I could easily make the maps of these small countries look interesting, as they are rich in details.





RESEARCH:
I finished preparing the questions for my research and the survey design.
The survey questions were mostly based on different studies about the audience’s attitudes towards ads and Web sites and on the hypotheses which have been supported in these studies.
I signed up for the website Surveymonkey.com and put the questions I planned for the survey on Web site ads. In previous discussions between me and my committee chair, we concluded that I needed to create a survey in a way that the audience could not go back to a Web site while answering the questions about it. The reason is that I need to make sure that they answer the questions based on their momentary impression of each Web site.
This proved to be a technical problem for me. Normally to create links in Surveymonkey, one has to put the link in a statement or a question. And then, there will be a new page outside the survey. This means that the audience could look at the same time at the questions and the Web site, which was not what I wanted.
Also all the pages of the questions share the same link. So it is impossible for me to make a link from one of my Web sites to a particular page of questions.
I consulted Mark Lewis, whose survey design on online news originally helped me form ideas about how to do my own survey. It turned out that his survey was made up of different surveys which explained why he could make links from a Web site to a particular page. This is because each page was actually a different survey, and therefore each has a different link.
This knowledge helped me to complete my survey design exactly the way I wanted it.

Week 8: May 4, 2009 to May 8, 2009

This week, Xiaoxian Ye and I worked on a slideshow about Demonstrations for Press Freedom. Ye chose the AP photos and I used Soundslides to make the slideshow. It is supposed to be put on the Web site after our print magazine comes out.
http://www.bengal.missouri.edu/~cn9dd/nguyen/publish_to_web/
For Soundslides, to create a non-audio slideshow, one needs a silent audio file. The available silent audio-file used by the Missourian is only 30 seconds long, while we had as many as 14 photos. Taking into account the fact that readers needed to read captions also, I used Audacity to extend this silence file to 45 seconds long.
I also took the initiative in writing to Huyen Vu, a Vietnamese reporter whom our reporter Jake Stokes wanted to interview for another slideshow of the magazine, to persuade her to agree to answer his questions about press freedom. She agreed despite her own personal security risk.
I created some more maps for the stories on the Web site. Here are the maps of Italy, Kosovo and Serbia, and Tunisia






As I mentioned in the last week, to make maps, I needed to incorporate different layers. These layers are different data files which cover different geographical aspects. The ones I had were for the world’s geography. They were shapefiles for ArcGIS, but I converted them into tab files for the user-friendly program MapInfo.
The biggest limitation of these files is that they do not provide as much detail as I want for small countries such as Sri Lanka or the United Arab Emirates or a new country e.g. Kosovo, as the files date from 1998.
I did a lot of searching on the Internet. There is an excellent free Web site for outlines of maps http://histgeo.ac-aix-marseille.fr/carto/index_en.htm, but I was prevented from using them due to copyrights. They are ready for use and supplied for non-profit and educational purposes only.

On the other hand, many sites which provide data files for map-drawing tend to only focus on certain countries such as the US. Some others which cover every country all the world only have the national boundaries of these countries and not of their administrative regions. Nor do they give room to such aspects as rivers and lakes, which would help to make maps more interesting.

It was not until the last day of the week that I found this site: http://biogeo.berkeley.edu/bgm/gdata.php. Its data files cover a wide range of aspects of geographical information about most countries in the world. This is what I managed to create thanks to the Web site: the maps of Kosovo and Sri Lanka.




Next week, one of my tasks will be making improvements on some maps to make them look better and more informative.
Here are the articles I made maps for this week.
http://www.globaljournalist.org/stories/2009/03/31/kosovos-fresh-start/
http://www.globaljournalist.org/stories/2009/03/02/sri-lankan-editor-killed/
http://www.globaljournalist.org/stories/2009/05/05/the-tunisian-illusion/
http://www.globaljournalist.org/stories/2008/12/01/cozy-relationship/
RESEARCH
I created the three versions of the animated ad for three different placements on the Web site. Thus, I finished my re-creation of the Global Journalist’s Web site with two ads, each in three positions: top, middle, and right.
http://www.bengal.missouri.edu/~cn9dd/nguyen/global2.html

Week 7

This week, I created three maps for the three stories of the web site. I used the map drawing program MapInfo to create the maps and make further changes in Photoshop. As the content management system of the Web site shrinks the photos for the Web site to 400 pixels wide, I couldn’t make the maps any larger than this and needed to make sure that the letters on the map are legible at that size.
Another popular map drawing program is ArcGIS. But this program was much more complicated than MapInfo and took much longer to master. Also, the main advantage of ArcGIS is that it is better for geographical analyses, while all I need is drawing maps.
For the maps, I incorporated different layers in MapInfo, depending on what the story was about: a layer of country shapes, a layer of cities, a layer of rivers, and a layer of administrative regions (i.e. state or provinces).
Here are the three maps I created for a story about the media state of 5 Central Asian countries, a story about Mumbai during the terrorist attack, and the one about how the tainted milk scandal was covered in various provinces in China.



My efforts to embed a Google map on our Web site still hit the dead end, as the IT trainers said that they themselves never tried embedding maps and therefore could not explain why I failed to use the Google map key.
RESEARCH:
I completed my copy of the Global Journalist’s Web site with 3 positions of the same ad. This work took me much more time than I expected, as instead of straight-forward table layout, I had to design a DIV layout which I was previously unfamiliar with, to be able to recreate the same appearance of this Web site.