Hello! 
My name is Josh, not Jim, Morrison. I’m a second semester graduate student in the Mass Communication MA program here at Texas State University. My home is in Austin and having lived there for almost six months I’m still a relative newcomer. I am in this program, and class, to help me as I transition from aspiring academic to someone who aspires to be employed in a communication industry. From the years I lived in the hopes of becoming an academic I have a previous MA in Communication from the University of Colorado-Boulder where I concentrated in rhetoric. As a rhetorician I studied fame and celebrity and that’s a pretty good window into my interests. I love things that POP. Actresses, pop-stars, glitz, and glam.
That set of interests is a potential informant regarding the kinds of projects I am interested in pursuing with the data journalism skills this class imparts. I have a lot of ideas floating around my mind, but they aren’t quite sharp yet. For instance, I think there is a story to be told about age and how that relates to actresses and pop stars. The shelf-life of female entertainers is almost always tragically shorter than those of their male counterparts. That sucks. As a queer-diva-worshiper I have a vested interest in making sure that the elder stateswomen of entertainment aren’t taken for granted and continue to receive opportunities.
On a slightly different note, I am interested in the ability to empathize that people innately have and data journalism’s ability to tap into it. In all of the reading we did there was a lot of talk about the ability of data journalism to make things real to people. The next step after “making it real” always seemed to be showing people how the data being discussed impacted their lives. I think that’s a great and noble goal. I also think there is another direction that the ability to make things real can move in: making other people and their stories more real to us.
In my recent talk with Maggie Gross, who is presenting on her research series (Understanding Average
) at SXSW Interactive in March, I first heard the term empathetic data. She uses the concept to conduct research that makes people and their lives, habits, and identities more real to the people who market to them. In data journalism we have the opportunity to do the same thing between people. Journalism has always done this; it has told stories about people that might have otherwise gone untold and led to the emotional engagement of a readership. Now, however, data can be used to link these stories to larger cultural trends and show how the stories being told do not represent isolated instances. We can help audiences muster up empathy for demographics, not just individuals. Telling stories that are symptomatic and being able to prove that quality is, to me, one of the greatest potentials of data journalism