Digital and Multimedia Journalism Class 6 – Data Visualization Aleszu Bajak Brandeis University Is This Visualization Effective? How Would You Improve It?

Digital and Multimedia Journalism Class 6 – Data Visualization Aleszu Bajak Brandeis University Is this visualization effective? How would you improve it?

Source: Hot Butter Studio WHAT IS DATA VISUALIZATION? Source: Hot Butter Studio WHAT IS DATA VISUALIZATION? WHY DO WE VISUALIZE DATA?

BEST PRACTICES

WORKSHOP RECORD

Source: Hanspeter Pﬁster ANALYZE

Source: Hanspeter Pﬁster COMMUNICATE To encode several dimensions of information To convey a complex story

Pitch interactive To convey patterns and relationships To visualize a complex narrative To connect readers to places (or vice versa) To entice readers to explore

A well designed legend can go a long way WHY DO WE VISUALIZE DATA?

BEST PRACTICES

WORKSHOP - Work in grayscale - Avoid chart junk

Source: Hanspeter Pﬁster -Don’t let function follow form -Let the data speak for itself. -Does it want to be a map, does it want to be a chart? Simplify!

Source: Alberto Cairo BEST PRACTICES

Sketch your ideas out on paper ﬁrst

Work in grayscale

Avoid chart junk

Don’t let function follow form

Is your dataviz central or complementary to the story?

Think about comprehension, annotation, legends QUICK ACTIVITY Sketch out a visualization idea for each of these stories:

Anti-drug strategies to ﬁght the current opioid crisis aren't working

The potential range of North Korea's current weapons would put most of the world in reach of its nuclear warheads

How Trump's refugee ban hurts health care in places that voted for him

What data/trend makes sense to visualize? How can you present it best for comprehension? Try to balance the literal with complementary. Include Omit Literal Complementary Dissonant If it doesn’t ﬁt, you must omit A quick aside: infographics and pictograms

-Is this data viz or an infographic? -Is this successful? -Can pictograms be useful?

Source: visuall.ly

This is what America's gun crisis looks like – The Guardian Combining annotation with illustration

Why recreate the race in a chart, infographic or illustration when you can annotate quality photos? WHY DO WE VISUALIZE DATA?

BEST PRACTICES

WORKSHOP CHARTS https://blogs.brandeis.edu/jour109b/dataviz/

Chartbuilder Beginner Intermediate

MAP ADDRESSES EXPLORE 311 ON GOOGLE CALLS MAPS IN BOSTON

https://blogs.brandeis.edu/jour109b/dataviz/ TAB 4 TAB 5

Google My Maps and Carto http://app.rawgraphs.io/ Data resources

Data portals https://github.com/caesar0301/awesome-public-datasets http://cooldatasets.com/ World Bank United Nations data DataHub data.gov Google “your city” +”data portal”

Others BuzzFeed’s Jeremy Singer Vine’s Data is Plural NICAR-listserv Data viz tools

Tableau Plotly Chartbuilder Piktochart Datawrapper visual.ly Highcharts Canva Graphiq Infogr.am ManyEyes easel.ly Charted.co Gephi My Maps RawGraphs Carto D3 Odyssey.js StoryMapJS