Week 14

This is my last required week working for my project.
I did a flash project for the story “Ethics in the age of digital manipulation”. This time, it was a slideshow of original and photoshopped photos on newspapers.
(The size of the slideshow on the Web site is bigger than the one I embedded here, as I had to make it fit in the blog).

http://www.globaljournalist.org/stories/2009/06/22/ethics-in-the-age-of-digital-manipulation/

I incorporated the images used for the printed version of the story with two other pairs of original and photoshopped photos I found on the AP’s Web site. It would have been great if I had got hold of some more, but despite my efforts, it seemed most flawed photos were no longer kept in the AP’s archive.
In the case of the three versions of the photo of the handshake between Chinese President Hu Jintao and late Deng Xiaoping, they were from a page of Chinese newspaper. The AP for some particular reasons did not separate the images and shot a picture of the whole newspaper page. I consulted our art director Lillian J.Kelly, who said that I should not split the images, either.
Therefore, with the images are of different shapes and sizes, I had to make compromises in designing to make sure that all the images looked clear and were in harmony with the accompanying features of the whole slideshow. I used violet for the background, dark blue for the holder of the buttons, and red to draw attention.
I also edited the photo on the homepage and published the story on the Web site



RESEARCH:
In the end, 68 people completed all the survey questions out of 146 people who began it. A common complaint was that the Web site looked so similar even with different ads, some respondents thought they were taken back to the previous page. This probably explained why so many people dropped out before they got to the end and at least several respondents seemed to give the same answers each time they were asked to look at a Web site.
I already copied all the figures from the survey responses to an Excel file and built my own coding for it, so that I could import the file into an SPSS program.
I am using Excel to sort the respondents into groups of age, sex, and time they spend on reading newspapers. Then, I will compare the attitudes of each small group towards each Web site. This information will be put side by side the attitudes of all the audience as a whole.

Week 13

This week I uploaded the pdf version of the Spring 2009 edition of our magazine.

I also edited three photos for the main story, published the story, as well as edited the photo of the homepage.

http://www.globaljournalist.org/stories/2009/06/16/pakistan-living-on-the-edge/
I created the map of Pakistan for the story.


I also redesigned the maps of China, Serbia and Kosovo, as well as those of India and Mumbai city, as I was not happy with the quality of the original ones, which were created at my beginning stage of using MapInfo. After I worked on a substantial number of maps, I wanted to make sure that they looked consistent.
Tainted

Kosovo's fresh start


Mumbai under the lense


RESEARCH:
I already got past the required number of 50 respondents who answered all the questions of my survey. I am currently manually copying the data into an excel file, which is a very time-consuming task. My survey actually consists of seven surveys, so I have to use the IP's of the respondents to make sure that I have the data of the same person for all the surveys. I will then put this data into a SPSS program.
While working with the data, I realized that the question “Are you aware of the ad?” which I included for each of the six Web sites was redundant. The statement “The ad grabbed my attention” with a 5-point-scale is already sufficient. As for the yes/no question, there is little use I could make with the information.

Week 12
This week I had to make two changes to the Flash project of the interviews with international journalists. The Pakistani journalist asked me to use a different photo of his for his interview, and the Chinese journalist Xin Zhiming wanted to have Taiwan and the Spratly Islands added to the map of his country, or else he would rather have his interview deleted. I had to turn to my supervisors Pat Smith and Stuart H. Lorry for advice in the latter case. Xin Zhiming eventually agreed that only Taiwan should be added to the map.

From working with the international journalists, I learned that it was very necessary to try to see their issues from their view points. When Xin Zhiming asked me to include the Spratly islands on the map of his country, admittedly, as a Vietnamese citizen I felt offended, because these are disputed islands among several countries, most significantly between China and Vietnam. It is currently the most heated issue in the relationship of the two neighbors. Many Vietnamese people used to demonstrate in front of the Chinese embassy in Hanoi to protest about the issue. And the anger ran even deeper in the population, as the Vietnamese government discouraged these demonstrations for fear of displeasing powerful China. However, the fact that I tried to see things as an independent journalist helped me to reply to him in an objective and appropriate way. His problem was finally solved and he felt that he was respected.

During the week, I edited front-page photo for the main story of the week which is a slideshow Xiaoxian Ye and I produced last semester using Soundslides (see week 8).


I could not publish the slideshow the way we originally did it however, as I would have to upload the whole folder, and not one single Flash file. This is currently impossible for our Content Management System. In the end, I had to upload the photos manually on the CMS and published the slideshow the way it has always been done at the Global Journalist.
http://www.globaljournalist.org/stories/2009/06/09/dont-seal-our-lips/
I added a North Indicator for all the maps I produced so far, following my committee chair Daryl Moen’s suggestion. I also made two new maps of Haiti and the Gaza Strip for two articles "A show of strenght" "Access denied in Gaza"



RESEARCH:
I made a final change for the survey: moving the position of the NEXT button to the end of the Web site, after some people complained that they could not find it when it was on the right side of the page. At the end of the week, I began to make the survey public. So far I got some 30 respondents who answered all the questions. The drop-out rate was very high, fewer than half of the people who began would go through to the end of the survey.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=bP_2blR_2f2MQRi7GvsVry2H1g_3d_3d




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Week 11

This week I completed the Flash project and published it online. I also edited the photo for the story on the main page.
Here is the photo I edited

Here is my Flash Project http://www.globaljournalist.org/stories/2009/06/01/independent-journalism-at-stake/


Before I started this project, I already spent a lot of time thinking about how to design it. There is a lot of information, with seven journalists and very long chunks of text for each of them. It would thus easily get boring. One idea was using the names of the journalists as links to the interviews with them, but I dropped it right away, as that would add more text and make the viewing more cumbersome. Another idea is using their photos. However, as the Egyptian journalist used an alias, I could not use her image. Also, the photos that I managed to get were very inconsistent in quality and different in color tones, one was even black and white. Therefore if I grouped all the images together, they would look disorganized.
I finally settled on the idea of the little maps of the countries from which the journalists came from as the buttons. They made the flash project more attractive while also giving adding information to the story. It gave readers some imagination about the countries where the journalists come from.
I made various measurements to make sure that the screen of the flash was suitable and not stretch beyond the computer screen. It could not be too small, as less text could be put on the screen, while it could not be too long, as it would stretch beyond the computer screen and viewers could not see the whole structure of the flash layout.
From this project, I felt that my vision in designing seemed to be improving markedly compared with when I began working at the Global Journalist. I have a better way of combining colors and of putting little details into the flash, so that it can be user-friendly while looking good. Examples are the maps with the name of the countries changing color when readers hover the mouse over each of them. Or the arrows will stay in the same places in each story. Also, the colors choices are consistent and complement each other.
RESEARCH:
I had to put some changes into my survey and Web sites. Khoi To, a statistics student, remarked that my mentioning in the introduction that there were as many as 69 questions would deter people from completing the survey. He recommended that I should cut down the questions which I was unwilling to do. Ngoc Vo, who worked as a web evaluator at the IE lab of School of Information of Science and Learning Technologies, said that I should make the introduction shorter, as most people will tend to skip it anyway and go straight to the survey. She also pointed out that I should not put the button “Next” inside my Web sites, as this will confuse the readers. They might assume that it belongs to the Web site and not that it is in fact a button of the survey. She recommended that I should put the button outside my Web site and make it look exactly like the one in the survey pages. I followed her advice about the changes.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=bP_2blR_2f2MQRi7GvsVry2H1g_3d_3d
I plan to try out the survey on some more of my friends to see if I could improve further and then launch it later this week or early next week the latest.