Graphic Novel

By: Rich Kane

In February, E&P introduced you to Infoactive, a startup that helps people turn complex data and migraine-inducing statistics into understandable charts and graphics. Founded by Trina Chiasson, a Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute research fellow, Infoactive’s simple drag-and-drop format can be a godsend for journalists who are trying to jazz up an otherwise mundane story.

So how did Chiasson follow up her site launch? With an e-book titled Data + Design: A Simple Introduction to Preparing and Visualizing Information. It’s an open-source, 299-page tome available for free downloading on the main infoactive.co website, written by more than 50 contributors in 14 different countries.

Essentially, Data + Design is a how-to primer for creating publishable eye-grabbing infographics, designed to be used by low-budget news organizations. It was assembled in part by Dyanna Gregory, a librarian and biostatistician, who reached out to Chiasson when she was running the Kickstarter campaign to fund Infoactive.

“Dyanna said, ‘Hey, this is cool, I was wondering what you can offer to people who are looking for more information on how to work with data?’” Chiasson said. “So we had a conversation, and we realized there was a need for this beyond Infoactive. Then we put a call out for contributors with the goal of creating better data sources for journalists.”

Chiasson and Gregory culled together a list of book chapters and ideas, scrutinized the qualifications and expertise of everyone who wanted to help write the book, and then started matching individuals up with chapters they would write.

“We had editors involved with every chapter we put out,” Chiasson said. “We talked about the different kinds of data that exist, what raw data is, the process of collecting, cleaning and visualizing data, types of visualization…There were lots of discussions about best ways to label data to make information clear and understandable. Apparently, pie charts get a lot of flack in the data visualization world.”

The end result is highly readable, even frequently entertaining, with fascinating looks at historical data compilations such as epidemiologist John Snow’s 1854 London cholera map, which helped trace the source of an outbreak to a single tainted well. Chapters like “The Importance of Color, Font and Icons,” “Deciding Which and How Much Data to Illustrate” and “Common Visualization Mistakes” (one of two chapters under a “What Not To Do” umbrella) are particularly insightful. And did you know that Florence Nightingale wasn’t just a famous nurse, but also a master data scientist?

Chiasson says the book is getting good feedback in social media data and journalism groups. “They like the design and appreciate the topics and conversational tones.”

 

For more information, go to infoactive.co/data-design