New skills: computer science, journalism and Destiny’s Children
Many of you know Donna DeCesare, documentary photographer and professor of photojournalism at the University of Texas at Austin. It was my privilege to recently work on her website, “Destiny’s Children,” a project that has been in the works for a few years now. I coded the website from scratch in Flash, adapting assets that had been developed for the project by a graphic designer.
I could write about Destiny’s Children, but the site is powerful and important and it speaks for itself. No, the thing that I want to write about is the intersection of technology and journalism. Technology and any field, really, but let’s talk journalism in particular. For example: is chemistry is a tool for storytelling? Instinct says no, but if you’ve ever printed a project in the darkroom, you learned to mix chemicals; you ran a redox reaction; you fixed silver salts out of an emulsion. You didn’t learn to turn water into wine, but you learned enough to do what was needed — and at least for a while, it’s a skill that was, more or less, needed.
Another example: the first print layout I ever did was for my eighth grade yearbook. It was a cut and paste affair, literally. We had scissors and glue sticks. There was one computer in the room, a Macintosh Classic with a nine-inch, two-color display; it was only capable of text editing. In high school, we used Adobe PageMaker. In college, we used InDesign. The tools changed, but the fundamental skills needed to lay out images and text did not. Things like visual balance were as applicable to my eighth grade yearbook as to my college newspaper.
Here’s what I’m driving at: somewhere between the college newspaper and working on Destiny’s Children, everything changed. Suddenly it wasn’t enough to know how to balance something visually. Suddenly I had to draw on a whole other set of skills — those of computer science. This was more than making a Flash graphic with a couple of buttons. This was full-on application design.
Making something like this isn’t at all like laying out a page or cutting together a video; you’re writing bits of code in different files, and they all have to fit and talk to each other in a way that makes sense. The image above is something from my notes, from when I was learning the framework I used to code Destiny’s Children. It’s nothing at all like the scissors and glue sticks of my youth.
We finished Destiny’s Children last month. In addition to the stories, Donna developed resources for affected communities and rich supplemental content. And even though my role was primarily technical, I’m proud to have been a part of it. I especially feel proud because it’s precisely the kind of collaboration between journalists and coders that we’re seeing more and more of today.
ProPublica has a GitHub page. The New York Times is engaged in open sourcing their tools as well. Columbia University will soon offer a dual degree in journalism and computer science. What’s more, as next-generation devices like the iPhone and iPad begin to gain a foothold, there’s enormous potential for these collaborations to yield new and amazing ways of telling the important stories of our time.
