Visualizing Palestine, Palestinian Territories (in English and Arabic)
Infographics, visualizations, data journalism, design

Part of the “Guide to Administrative Detention” poster

Visualizing Palestine uses beautifully designed infographics to tell stories about Palestinians and the Palestinian territories. It covers topics usually absent from the discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, such as detailing the lack of access to medical care in Lebanon, or showing the school enrollment rates of Palestinian refugee children who have fled Syria for neighboring countries. Each infographic is accompanied by a list of sources. The site makes the complex data behind the infographics understandable and publishes its visualizations under a creative commons license so they can be used by other media.

“You don’t remember numbers or statistics. You remember stories. We create the visualizations so people can use them as tools to advocate for something.” Ramzi Jaber, co-founder of Visualizing Palestine in an interview with DW

HarassMap, Egypt (in Arabic and English)
Mapping, social media, crowdsourcing, social research, mobile technology

HarassMap was set up in response to the high rates of sexual assault in Egypt. Launched in 2010, it allows people to anonymously report when and where they were victims of sexual harassment. They can do this by calling, texting, emailing or tweeting. Incidents are then documented on an online map, based on the open-source Ushahidi mapping software. The idea is to use crowdsourcing to better understand sexual harassment in Egypt, where there is little research on the subject. HarassMap is a volunteer-based, independent initiative. You can read more about the project on DW.

Stop Fake, Ukraine (in English and Russian)
Fact checking, citizen journalism, social media

Run by a small group of current and former students from the Mohyla School of Journalism in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, StopFake curates and refutes false claims spread by Russian media about the conflict in Ukraine. The fake-busting site has proved hugely popular since it started in March 2014. In its first few weeks of operation, it had 1.5 million visitors and some of the weekly video round-ups detailing the fakes have more than 100,000 views on YouTube. Many of its reports make the rounds on social media.

“We do the same things as anyone else would do – find the truth, check the facts, talk to people, and these are universal ways to improve journalism in any country.” Co-founder Yevhen Fedchenko in an interview with onMedia

CGNet Swara, India
Citizen journalism, mobile technology

CG Net Swara allows people to ring up and leave a voice message about something important to them, or listen to the stories of other users. The service is most commonly used to air grievances, such as the non-payment of wages, or to pass on local news. Selected recordings are checked by journalists and published on the site, as are text summaries. Some issues are also passed onto contacts in the mainstream media. The idea is for CG Net Swara to act as a citizen journalist’s forum in India’s impoverished Chhattisgarh state, where there is a shortage of media services in local tribal languages.

“Our primary goal and area of operation is media dark zones. There are 100 million people living in central tribal India and they have no voice.” Founder Shubhranshu Choudhary in an interview with the Doha Center for Media Freedom

Rutas del Conflicto, Columbia (in Spanish)
Database, mapping, crowdsourcing, mobile technology

The Routes of Conflict project tracks massacres and violence that have taken place in Columbia since 1982. Users can search the online database according to victims’ names, locations or armed groups. The resulting map shows how many people were killed in each incident, who the victims were, who was responsible for the killings and also provides links to relevant documents. The information is also available via a mobile app.

African SkyCam, Kenya
Drone journalism

African SkyCam is a group of journalists who want to show newsrooms that there is a cost effective way of capturing aerial footage to give African audiences new and independent perspectives on a story. Because African media organizations usually don’t have their own helicopters, they have to rely on hitching lifts with police or military to get certain shots. Drones are a way of being more independent.

“With an eye in the sky, African journalists can tell stories that might have been impossible without access to aerial footage.” Founder Dickens Onditi Olewe in an interview with onMedia

Khabar Lahariya, India (in English as well as several other languages local to India)
Citizen journalism, newspaper collective

Khabar Lahariya is a small weekly newspaper published in several local languages by a group of marginalized rural women in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar states. The idea behind the eight-page paper is to spread and promote information about life in rural areas – covering everything from reported rape to a house fire in a local village. Founded in 2002, the paper now has 40 women journalists and a print run of around 6,000. It’s estimated a single copy of the paper is read by ten or more people. The collective launched an online site in 2013.

“We expose problems and we follow up on the solutions.” Reporter Meera Devi in an interview with The Hindu

CONNECTAS (in Spanish, Portuguese and English)
Networking, investigative journalism

CONNECTAS is a non-profit journalism project for Latin America with the aim of promoting transnational investigative journalism and training.

“The media in Latin America have focused excessively on what happens in the countries’ capital cities, and report very little about what is going on countrywide, much less what is happening around the continent.” CONNECTAS founder Carlos Eduardo Huertas in an article published by the Nieman Foundation

Poderopedia (in Spanish)
Database, visualizations, fact checking

Poderopedia provides a verified source of information on influential politicians and business people, such as who their family members are, where they went to school and university, and who they have worked for in the past. It also visualizes the relationships between the people and the organizations in its data base, revealing networks of influence. The platform first started in Chile, where business and politics are closely connected, and has subsequently expanded to Venezuela and Colombia.

“We consider Poderopedia, in its call for transparency and dissemination of data, to be a mechanism against the lack of transparency that currently, above all, characterizes Venezuelan institutions, both private and public.” Marianela Balbi, director of Venezuela’s Press and Society Institute.

Africa Check (in English)
Fact checking

Africa Check aims to sort fact from fiction on a variety of African topics, such as the real population of Nigeria or claims that cancer causes more deaths than AIDS on the continent. Founded in June 2012, the project runs in a partnership with the journalism department of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. It has 50,000 to 60,000 unique visitors each month. It also has a slew of resources for journalists on its site about how to fact check properly. Read more about the project on onMedia.

“There is a huge increase in the flow of information and also of misinformation One of the things we are concerned about is giving journalists tools to verify this information.” Africa Check founder Peter Cunliffe-Jones

Animal Político, Mexico (in Spanish)
Digital media, social media

Animal Político is an online news site devoted to Mexican politics that is especially popular with young readers. It attracts more than three million visitors per month and has nearly a million likes on Facebook – numbers that continue to grow rapidly. The site started off as a Twitter news service in 2009 and since its inception, the founders have emphasized the use of social media to attract readers. Interestingly, it’s a freestanding digital media organization – which means it’s not supported by grants and foundations, or by another media institution.

“We don’t care that the (Mexican) president went to Querétaro or Michoacán today and gave a speech….We actually care a lot more about … the social impact that policies have on people, the civic organizations working to better the country, and about human rights violations.” Founder Daniel Eilemberg in an interview with WLRN

Chicas Poderosas, Latin America (in English and Spanish)
Data journalism, networking

Chicas Poderosas is a network and training model to encourage female journalists in Latin America to embrace digital technologies and data journalism. It’s about building a diverse digital network of digital journalists.

“At Chicas we help journalists learn technology and we connect them with mentors, developers and designers so they can keep learning.” Founder Mariana Santos in an interview with the Knight Foundation

InfoAmazonia, Brazil (in English, Spanish and Portugese)
Mapping, database, geojournalism, citizen journalism, news aggregator

The project tracks forest loss and other environmental issues, such as bush fires, in the Amazon basin and displays this information in interactive maps. To do this it, InfoAmazonia uses a combination of satellite and other data as well as citizen reporting from the nine countries of the Amazon region. It also aggregates news stories about the Amazon.

“The ultimate goal is that displaying this information with such impacting visuals will help to elevate the debate on public policy in this region to another level.” Gustavo Faleiros, founder of Infoamazonia in an interview with Visualloop.com

Plataforma de Periodismo (in Spanish)
Networking

Plataforma de Periodismo aims to improve the coverage of conflict and post-conflict Columbia and create a network of journalists who cover these issues. The website is set up as a training space, with resources, case studies and digital tools.

“We saw the need to create a digital space to train, inform, and reflect on these topics,” said project coordinator Edilma Prada Céspedes in an interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

Code for Africa
Data journalism, networking

The Code for Africa initiative aims to nurture the skills necessary for people to find, access and use data in order to promote more transparency. There are already country chapters in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa and plans for several other countries to follow.

Compiled by Holger Hank, Peter Deselaers, Guy Degen and Steffen Leidel, edited by Kate Hairsine

Photo: J Mark Dodds, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

With such a frenzy around everything related to football and the World Cup in Brazil, media departments are madly experimenting with how they can grab readers’ attention. One thing they are doing is coming up with some stunning ways of telling football stories with numbers. From a slick image of the most popular beer in each World Cup country to a map displaying how comfortable different nationalities are about the idea of a national player coming out as gay, there is literally something out there for everyone.

Every day, our colleagues over at DW Innovation are combing the internet for innovative visualizations, infographics and storytelling all around the 2014 Brazil World Cup. Their collection is in a ScribbleLive document embedded below – this means that you just have to check back to this blog post and it will update automatically with DW Innovation’s daily discoveries.

Screenshot of WHO health infrastructure statistics

We are big fans of visualizing data and we’ve produced several blog posts exploring trends in data journalism and useful tools such as datawrapper and infogr.am that can help you get started.

But sometimes, in all the hype around investigating huge sets of data, we might forget that visualizing even small amounts of information can be great for your stories.

Crunching numbers and interpreting statistics are a part of the daily grind of journalism. They help us back up a statement or prove something. They also show trends. However, numbers are often confusing or the concepts behind them are difficult to understand, especially when they are written out in a text. This is where graphs or charts can help. This post will give you some quick examples to demonstrate how simple graphs, charts or iconographs can make numbers easier to understand or more interesting for your readers. Then hopefully, you’ll be inspired to create your own!

Show us, don’t tell us – power use in India

What do you think of the following two sentences?

“India’s power use is currently 210 gigawatts per year. This is expected to increase by 36 percent by 2017 and by a further 25 percent in 2022.”

Like me, you probably think that they are pretty confusing and dull to read (aside from the fact that they don’t tell us what the actual power use is going to be in 2020). Instead of telling readers about the growth of India’s power production, it would be much better to show them by creating a graph. Note though, that a chart usually needs some text to provide context or a brief explanation. I produced this example quickly in datawrapper.

You could also use an iconograph to make the graph stand out – here’s the same information presented in a different way. And you can still use an introductory text, something like:

“India is the fifth largest generator of electricity in the world. At present, two thirds of its power is produced by coal-driven power plants. And it’s not going to get better.”

Source: Urbanemissions.info

Give a clear overview of the issue – flow of money sent by migrants from South Africa

A colleague in Malawi was recently writing an article about how much money migrant workers sent home from South Africa as remittances. Although he picked out some statistics to put into his article, he wanted to show the amount sent to each country. He only had a couple of minutes before deadline so we quickly made this chart.

The data, however, also tells another story. It also shows how the majority of remittances are sent to Zimbabwe (in fact 60 percent of the total amount) compared to the other countries.

Depending what angle you are taking in your text, you could also chose to highight this fact. I used infogr.am to make this, literally, in two minutes.

Highlight the differences – unemployment rates in Europe

In his tutorial on how to use Datawrapper, Gregor Aisch created a graph of youth unemployment statistics over the past two decades in Europe. In his example graph, he highlighted in red countries with high unemployment (Spain & Greece) and those with low unemployment such as Germany in blue. The graph really illustrates the difference between the countries far better than a wordy description.

As you can see, data visualization doesn’t have to be about making amazing graphics with huge amounts of data. You can use tools available on the Internet or even in Excel, Office Open Calc or Google spreadsheets to create simple graphics and help you to tell a better story.

Author: Kate Hairsine

Interactive visualizations and info-graphics are gaining popularity in the media. More and more journalists are becoming interested in producing data-driven stories on their own or with the help of developers. So what do aspiring data journalists need to know? What do they need to keep in mind when working with developers, how much programming do journalists actually need to understand – and what are the best tools to get started?

DW Akademie’s Natalia Karbasova talked to the German visualisation architect and interactive news developer Gregor Aisch. Among other things, Gregor has worked on the development of Datawrapper, a tool that allows journalists to build simple interactive charts. He also develops visualizations for media organisations such as Deutsche Welle and Zeit Online.

“Journalists need to overcome their fear of the so called hackers,“, says Gregor. “This might sound funny to some, but many people still have these mental image of criminal suspects spending their days and nights writing viruses and trying to crack security systems of banks and governments”.

Gregor, you come from the technical side. Do you enjoy working with journalists?

Yes, I really like working with journalists. They usually have a clear understanding of the subject they’re reporting about, and do have lots of interesting ideas for how to tell stories. That’s something you cannot always expect when you’re working with the marketing guys or PR departments.

What do journalists need to know to tell compelling data-driven stories?

Getting a good feeling for the scope, time frame and limitations of web based data visualizations is very helpful in the day-to-day work with data journalism. After all, designing interactive visualization is not unlike software development, so you need to be good in managing expectations and resources to ensure the final result is delivered in time. Otherwise lots of frustration is inevitable.

What do journalists need to keep in mind when teaming up with developers?

It’s a lot like with any other project management. It’s a good idea to talk to each other on a regular basis, especially in the beginning of a new project. The big challenge is to develop a common vision of something that is just not yet there. Hand-drawn sketches are really powerful for communicating ideas in such early stages.

How much programming do journalists actually need to understand?

First of all, journalists need to overcome their fear of the so called ‘hackers’. This might sound funny to some, but many people still have these mental image of criminal suspects spending their days and nights writing viruses and trying to crack security systems of banks and governments. Regular meetings such as the Hacks/Hackers meeting in Berlin are helping in ‘building bridges’ between hacks (journalists) and hackers (developers).

For the day-to-day work with datasets, I find that it is really helpful to learn some basic scripting. The initial learning curve is steep, but after one or two days you’ll be impressed what you can achieve. Often, writing a few lines of code can save us from repeating simple tasks over and over again. In an environment such as online journalism where deadlines are usually short and critical, time-saving is crucial.

And, as said above, it would be very helpful if journalists would get a feeling for what is doable and how long things take. I don’t think that every journalist need to be able to create full interactive data visualizations, since it takes several years to get there, but they should keep an eye on the possible solutions.

What visualization possibilities do journalists have in case they can’t program?

Excel, LibreOffice, Tableau Public, ManyEyes, Datawrapper, QuantumGIS: all these tools provide visualization modules that enable anyone to create rich data visualizations and maps in a short time. The tools are either free downloadable, or already installed on most computers or accessible via web browsers, so it’s easy and cheap to get started. But of course, it takes some time to learn new software.

What should journalists interested in data reporting start with?

I would consider working with a spreadsheet software as the first step for doing data journalism. Most data-driven stories start with a simple data table, so you need to be able to perform simple computations, such as dividing the number of fatalities by the total number of car accidents in all the districts of your country. For those who get confused by the strange user interface of Excel, I clearly recommend working with the free alternative LibreOffice Calc. This is spreadsheet as simple and powerful as it gets.

There are a number of data visualizations out there and this has produced a lot of hype, but what are some of the mistakes made in these visualizations?

First of all, I love data visualization, so I like them being used more and more in reporting. One of the worst mistakes I have seen are poorly labeled charts. If you solely rely on tooltips you can be sure that you’re doing it wrong.

What are your favourite visualizations and why?

This example by the New York Times shows a ‘scatterplot’ with the college graduation rate on the horizontal axis and the percentage of black, Hispanic and Asian students among the freshman on the vertical axis. You can clearly see that at the top colleges with high graduation rates, the rates of black students are significantly lower. For instance there are only 8.8% black students among last year’s freshman at Harvard university which has a graduation rate of 97%.

The topic is big in US right now, as more states are now banning the ‘affirmative action plans’. Going back to the Kennedy/Johnson administration of the 1960’s, these plans required universities to reach certain quotes for different races. Now more and more Republican states are aiming to ban these plans because such a quote would not be lawful.

In a follow-up piece a few weeks ago the NYT showed the effect of previous bans in states such as California. Here they compared the percentage of freshmen of certain races with the total percentage of college-aged residents of that race. Especially in California, the ban of the affirmative action plan was followed by a dramatic drop of enrollment of Hispanic and black students.

As a third example I would like to point to an excellent piece done by Matthew Bloch and Hannah Fairfield. In an interactive Venn diagram they showed how diseases of the elderly are overlapping. A total of 9% of 700,000 people in assisted living centers have a combination of heart disease, high blood pressure and Alzheimer’s disease, which is extremely difficult to treat.

All of these example come from the New York Times. What’s so special about the way they approach data journalism?

Amanda Cox has once put it this way: you need to take the reader by the hand and guide him through the graphic. Without this annotation layer, any graphic is just a matter of “here you go, now figure it out yourself”. The other thing I think the NYT is doing right is to hire the right kind of people (graphic editors, cartographers, 3D animators and interactive developers) and bring them together in one single place. In a lot of newsrooms in Germany you can still see the graphic teams for print or television separated from the online teams, making it a lot harder to create high quality interactive graphics.

What data visualization resources you’d recommend to keep an eye on?

I’d recommend this list of data visualizations, the blog by Alberto Cairo, this resource from the Mozilla Open News, this collection of pieces of code for different visualizations and the website “Informations Aesthetics”.

What are the books every aspiring data journalist should read?

The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics,

The Functional Art: An introduction to information graphics and visualization and Data Visualization: A successful design process.