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