Visualization as storytelling

Infosthetics has some recent interesting articles including:

• Journalism in the Age of Data: Visualization as a Storytelling Medium
• Research: How Effective is Animation in Showing Temporal Trends? (see also No more excuses: a list of references to learn how to use color by the same author, and via @Coleran, Animations in User Interface Design: Essential Nutrient Instead of Eye Candy)
• David McCandless at TED on the Beauty of Data Visualization

Here's the movie from the 1st article (viewed best on the Stanford website) and some excerpts from Iron Man 2 for a jumpstart:

Journalism in the Age of Data from geoff mcghee on Vimeo.

Update: @nickvegas shares info on storytelling in How Beginners Get Better: Ira Glass Explains,

"Ira sums up in a five minute video what took me years to figure out. Follow these four rules and you will become better at what you do. Period.

1. Have good taste.
2. it’s OK to suck. You will get better over time.
3. Set project deadlines to practice and get better!
4. Be patient and don’t quit. It takes a while."

Update: from Columbia Journalism Review see also Steal This Heat Map! Easy, free program to turn spreadsheets into maps and this excerpt from Data Visualization for Beginners: Notes from Geoff McGhee’s Knight Fellowship report,

"If you want the most basic, most thorough tutorial, I recommend this one by Scot Hacker of the Knight Digital Media Center, who shows how to create a visualization with free Google Charts and Gadgets, from start to finish (spreadsheet to embedded chart), called “Data Visualization for Non-Programmers.”

And for further reading: Paul Bradshaw’s mini-tutorial on The Guardian’s DataBlog,“How to Be a Data Journalist” and the follow-up on his personal blog, “Where Should An Aspiring Data Journalist Start?”, Anthony Calabrese on PBS MediaShift on the power of visualization, help forums from Hacks/Hackers, CJR’s Q&A in two parts with Chris Wilson and David Plotz on their data projects at Slate Labs, and the TED talk that David McCandless gave earlier this year on his own elegant design solutions for journalistic problems."