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.