At the heart of the Guardian's Digital First agenda is a desire to create new, informative and entertaining ways to engage readers online. Jonathan Richards is part of The Guardian Interactive team, a small group of specialist designers, interactive developers and journalists working alongside editorial teams with this goal in mind. It's work blends data visualisation, rich, two-way interaction and trusted narrative techniques to produce new ways of engaging with readers.
"How rumours spread on Twitter during the riots", a recent project, tried to make sense of how misinformation spreads on social networks by applying algorithmic analysis to large data sets, then visualising the results with a custom graphics engine. Other projects have experimented with 3D frameworks, reader modelling, processing of vast amounts of reader data, and responsive design. The Guardian Interactive team is also engaged in an exciting new project to develop a set of open source, visualisation tools.