Wednesday’s Keynote talk at SIGGRAPH was from New York Times Graphics Director Steve Duenes, and information aesthetics was there and has a great writeup on it.
In his talk titled “A Visual Response to the News”, he addressed the “brute reporting” power behind a typical NYTimes infographic, for instance all the background research that was involved in creating the “1 year after 9/11” map. He described the considerations behind the 3D rendering showing how Saddam Houssein was captured. Next, the graph shootings of Virginia Tech, which involved scraping the website of Virginia Tech university to find staff members, and identify the ones that were probably teaching in the building.
via SIGGRAPH’09: Steve Duenes (NYTimes Graphics Director) Keynote Talk – information aesthetics.
At this year’s Where2.0 con, Matthew Ericson of the NYT spoke about the issues pertaining to creating the Blue State – Red State maps of the last election cycle. They put a lot of thought into mapping and visual representation over there!