In Egypt, making Atlas more friendly to Arabic users
Over the course of a week in late July, Atlas for Africa training took place in a set of diverse newsrooms and organizations in Egypt’s capital Cairo. The sessions brought together dozens of journalists, freelancers, and designers all interested in the intersection of storytelling, data, and interactive visualization.
The first session was hosted by the Arab Data Journalists Network, which works to promote data journalism in the Middle East and North Africa. Business Forward, the knowledge portal of the American University in Cairo’s School of Business, organized the second session. The third session involved reporters from Welad El Balad, a community media outlet that employs reporters across Egypt and specializes in covering political, social, and economic issues from a local point of view. Reporters and editors from Mada Masr, an independent, bilingual digital news site, also hosted Quartz for an Atlas for Africa session at their offices in Cairo.
What I noticed working with these reporters is that many were at a very sophisticated level when it came to applying or visualizing data in their stories. Some of them had also done work using software like Tableau and ZingChart, which are both used to visualize data and develop responsive charts. Some of the participants in these sessions also had experience in motion graphics, and wanted to know if there was a possibility of animating the Atlas charts in their videos — an issue that was raised in the Nairobi training too.
Some of the trainees also wanted to know if one could develop charts through mobile phones. I mentioned that the “Mobile Settings” section in the Atlas platform, which was edited on the big screen, made it easy to develop charts for mobile and smaller screens.
The biggest question that dominated the training in Egypt was whether Atlas was compatible with the Arabic language. Reporters who attended the training were mostly bilingual — if not multilingual — and wrote in both Arabic and English. But their audiences, they noted, mostly only wrote and spoke in Arabic. During the practice sessions, different trainees tried various methods to incorporate Arabic into their charts. It was, however, Hala Safwat and Awad Basseet at Welad Al Balad who finally cracked it.
Given that Arabic is written from right to left, anyone making a chart needs to reverse the X and Y axes on Excel. The Western Arabic numerals, however, stay the same. For now, it is also advised that the chart is embedded as a photo and not as a link given that Atlas still doesn’t recognize Arabic.
To avail the Atlas training manual to Arabic speakers, Mohammed Nasr, a data analyst at the leading data visualization agency InfoTimes, wrote a blog outlining seven steps on how to make an Atlas chart.
This blog post is part of a series written for Atlas for Africa, an initiative to bring Quartz’s chart-building platform, Atlas, to newsrooms and organizations across Africa for free, in support of greater access to Africa-focused data sources and visualization. Interested in a training session with the Atlas for Africa team? Email atlasforafrica@qz.com. Atlas for Africa is supported by Code for Africa’s innovateAFRICA fund and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
