More on the Data Journalism School by Ahref and Istat (#djs12)

Given the many data and tools freely available today, there is no excuse to avoid a flow of experiments and data journalism projects. Based on this suggestion by Simon Rogers on The Guardian’s DataBlog, here is a summary of the second day events at the Data Journalism School promoted by Ahref Istat in Rome (#djs12).  

Stefano De Francisci dealt with principles and statistics behind visualizations, moving from Edward Tufte to Stephen Few (author of “Show with numbers”) and Hans Rosling, founder of Gapminder and developer of Statistic eXplorer, adopted by Ocse and Istat (and also the same engine of Google Fusion). Federico Geremei and Fabio Lipizzi focused on a critical use of source and repositories, while Tomaso Pisapia addressed the crucial issue of data access.

Paolo Ciuccarelli (Density Design Lab at Milan’s Politecnico) said that a graphic data presentation should not be reduced to a visualization, adding that a developing visual story about complex can never be neutral (despite Tufte). To support his point, Ciuccarelli illustrated the Napoleon’s March to Moscow in Russia (1912) byCharles Minard, the Data Visualization Serendipity by Joe Boeckenstedt, and Newsmap, a visualization of Google News.

Several tools introduced at the event seemed very easy to use right away: Many Eyes, Tableau Public and Google Fusion, already included in a toolkit by Elisabetta Tola; Visual.ly, to visualize social media data; an intuitive Infogram, and Fineo, a great tool for flow charts launched one year ago by Density Design.

Finally, Ciuccarelli threw a provocative idea: is data visualization another bubble ready to burst?  Most probably that’s the case right now, but after that we will surely have an innovation wave of best practices and tools.