Thursday, June 22, 2017

Student work: Visualizing forest loss in the Amazon

I want to bring your attention to Silent Forest, a large news documentary project that maps forest degradation and destruction in the Brazilian Amazon. The Guardian has a good story about it, and the About section itself can help you understand what it covers, so I won't bore you with details. I just wish to highlight the visualizations and illustrations in it, designed by my student Laura Kurtzberg.

Laura is a student in our MFA in Interactive Media. She came to the program with experience in coding and mapping, and her skills have only gotten better in this first year with us. Silent Forest can give you an idea of what she's capable of: From interactive data visualizations to pictorial illustrations, like the ones you'll see in the section about bird species. She can also model and animate in 3D, but she didn't show off here.

(Full disclosure: I'm listed as a “special advisor in data visualization” but my participation was limited to giving some feedback on the graphics.)