by Jason Mccoy
In a previous blog post I explained what data journalism is and how it is used to help journalists tell better stories, but this post will feature a data journalist who is finding innovative ways to tell stories through Big Data. Just to recap, data journalism is described by Paul Bradshaw in The Data Journalism Handbook as, "perhaps it is the new possibilities that open up when you combine the traditional 'nose for news' and ability to tell a compelling story, with the sheer scale and range of digital information now available. Data journalism can help a journalist tell a complex story through engaging infographics. Data can be the source of data journalism, or it can be the tool with which the story is told — or it can be both."
Mona Chalabi is an excellent example of a data journalist combining the abilities of journalism with the use of complex digital information and numbers to tell interesting stories. Chalabi is a British data journalist, known for her publications with FiveThirtyEight and The Guardian, whose work has covered politics, economics and ethnic and racial issues. Perrin Drumm describes Chalabi's work perfectly in DROWNING IN DATA: Making the Unknown Known With Mona Chalabi by saying, "while other statisticians and data journalists are busy using software to make one blasé bar chart after another, Chalabi is hand-drawing much of the same information to much greater effect. Her work is smart, irreverent and shareable. Most importantly, though, it's honest…. her illustrations have progressed from simple coloured-pencil drawings on graph paper to felt tip pens—"a definite choice to make the designs more bold"—with newer experiments in animation and watercolours."
Chalabi's work is so amazing because her visualizations illustrate the statistics in interesting ways that the reader can understand, and her visualizations avoid boring and difficult to understand graphs and numbers. Drumm says that Chalabi's visualizations have to meet three criteria: 1. It's memorable, 2. It connects the subject matter with the numbers, and 3. It communicates uncertainties. One reason Chalabi's infographics are interesting is because they don't use numbers. Chalabi says, "I don't think that adds anything to people's understanding. To me it's about relative scales." And remember, she says, "every single data point is about a person. I'm trying to make that connection clearer. The visuals are a really important part of that, but—and maybe this is my lack of cultural knowledge; growing up we did not do cultural shit—I'm always trying to speak in the simplest terms possible," writes Drumm at Riposte Magazine." Mona Chalabi's work is one example of how Big Data can make journalism more innovative and tell better stories, and Chalabi shows us all that numbers and statistics do not have to be boring or difficult to understand.
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