Thursday, 28 January

Maps, comics, pie charts, graphs, interactive news articles, instruction manuals – these are things that we rely on to make sense of the world. Data visualisation is a huge, interdisciplinary field, present within all visual media. And yet it can seem almost invisible – hiding in plain sight – often claiming the voice of the dispassionate, objective truth-teller.
In a world where the sheer amount of information can be dizzying, data visualisation can help us understand the bigger picture, break it down into more meaningful components, put things in relation and perspective and help us see big changes that are taking place over eons of time. It can fit information that seems overpowering and limitless into a story, so that we can relate to it.
It can also create a sense of control where there is no control, choose whose story to put forward, hide important information by directing our gaze, or flat out mislead and lie to us.
As we are turning more and more towards the visual over the textual, data visualisation is an exploding field. Being based in the visual field, data visualisation forms our world view in a different way than text does, with different implications.
In this node, we want to look at some of the different professions of the data visualizer, their places and agencies within the journalistic field and explore some of the ethical issues that comes with visualizing the world.

The technical aspect of the data visualisation may seem intimidating, but it's neither the hardest nor the most important thing to master. I will share some other aspects of being a data visualizer and storyteller that are either crucial to my practice or areas that I aspire to do more work on. These are thoughts I reflected upon, lessons I learned while telling stories with data.
Youyou Zhou is a visual journalist working with data and code. She produces data-driven, visual, interactive and experimental journalism that breaks free of word-based article formats. Previously, she covered immigration and the business of migration at the business publication Quartz as a data and visuals reporter, built news apps at The Associated Press, and designed data visualisation projects for a wide range of clients.