3 Things Mona Chalabi Taught us About Data
By Hannah Myrick
We sat down with Mona on our podcast Al Empire to talk about her journey from storyteller to famed data journalist.
Mona is a British Iraqi data journalist, and currently the Data Editor at Large for The Guardian. She is a multimedia producer, working on the video series she co-created called The Vagina Dispatches that was nominated for an Emmy Award. She’s produced with Netflix, BBC, National Geographic, and made podcasts with the likes of The Guardian and Gimlet Media. She also held an art exhibit earlier this year about “the ways that women and people of color aren’t allowed to take up space.”
“Trying to take the numb out of numbers.”
— Mona Chalabi, Twitter (@MonaChalabi)
Mona’s popular infographics take complex data and make it immediately digestible, informative and enjoyable. Her work is a goldmine of information.
No matter the subject and its seriousness, many of us leave her illustrations seeing and understanding the world a little bit differently.
1. Behind Every Data Set Is A Human
Mona’s focus in journalism has always been data. Her first job at The Guardian was at the data journalism desk. But the uncanny ability she holds to deliver information comes from her ability to illustrate it all. She has found a way to bring numbers to life.
“When you hear a number like three thousand five hundred sixty-four, What does that even mean? Is that a lot? Is it a little? Every time I hear something about billionaires, I have no frame of reference for understanding the amount and the thinking that goes with it.
— Mona Chalabi, Al Empire
The human-ness of the whole process is crucial to Mona. Her artwork is clearly drawn by hand to remind us that a human made decisions that went into the data itself.
“I think a lot of people aspire to this idea that they are producing perfectly objective work that has some kind of moral purity because of it. And that’s just not the case. These numbers have an emotional weight to them.
— Mona Chalabi, Al Empire
2. Ask For Feedback
Mona’s process starts and ends with consulting her friends. She’ll often find the research herself, based on what’s she’s interested in, but sometimes she’ll also ask a friend:
“When I come up with a glossy illustration I send it to four or five friends who have nothing to do with journalism. Nothing to do with the writing or the media. I ask them if it makes sense to them and very often they’re like “No.” This does not make sense. This isn’t good. And that’s such crucial feedback to me because if it doesn’t make sense then I don’t want to publish it”.
3. Find Ways To “Translate” The Data
Mona’s ability to consume data and make it digestible comes partly from her first job, analyzing large data sets at the Bank of England, then Transparency International and the International Organization for Migration. Those skill sets would later converge with art.
“It’s really important to me that the subject is inherent in that visual. I think that means that the visual itself is more memorable because you saw a chart about flooding that looks like a flood.”
— Mona Chalabi, Al Empire
First, she finds a topic that she or her audience is curious about. Again it could be anything. She digs through sources that come from government numbers, or google scholar or academic pieces. She moves those numbers to a spreadsheet and figures out which chart type best communicates the information. From here, her artistic connections create a link between what she’s trying to communicate and the subject of the data.
“I kind of see my role as being a translator to dig into those studies and take this brilliant work that has been done by someone and try to translate in a way that feels honest and true to the original findings. and doesn’t compromise the accuracy but just makes them accessible.
— Mona Chalabi, Al Empire
Check out the original post on our Kerned and Cultured blog
