Visualisations and narratives in digital media: An Introduction

Abstract

The digital media have undergone an unprecedented transformation in recent years by exploiting the combined communicative potential of interaction and visualisation, generating, in this way, new narrative forms and journalistic stories. But this is not something that can be analysed in isolation. Understanding the digital media requires addressing the study of interactive texts and the platforms of the digital ecosystem from different perspectives. The digital media today have highly permeable boundaries, the guidelines that define them being subject to constant modification: their texts are dynamic and constantly changing, their systems operate, thanks to artificial intelligence, as just another actor that analyses, collects and manages information. The space separating senders and receivers of messages has become fuzzy and interwoven. For this reason, the study of digital journalism has to assume this unremitting transformation as simply one more element in the debate about the media, and accept it as a characteristic of the digital culture that defines the field of communication.