In Nairobi, questions about data visualization and animation in Atlas for Africa’s first training sessions
Atlas for Africa’s first training sessions took place in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, last week, and saw a number of questions raised about the objective behind the use of charts in stories, the importance of data visualizations, and the benefits of animated charts versus static graphs.
My colleague, Lily Kuo, and I worked with eight people from two different organizations that were both founded a few years ago in Kenya.
The first training was on Tuesday, June 13, with Africa Uncensored (AU), an award-winning, independent media house created by some of Kenya’s most prominent investigative reporters. The outlet does a lot of informative documentaries and human interest stories, exposing corruption in government and public institutions. These include stories about how officials from Nairobi’s city council allegedly extorted millions of dollars from hawkers, the struggle of Kenya’s indigenous people, and negligence at Kenyan hospitals.
The Africa Uncensored team was very excited about the prospect of using Atlas in their storytelling, particularly as the election season gets underway in Kenya. Some of the election-related stories they are currently working on involve dissecting the data set of Kenya’s electorate and extracting stories from that data.
But given that most of the organization’s work is in broadcast, the team was interested to know if there was a possibility to animate the Atlas charts in their videos. One videographer with the team argued that pairing compelling data with well-crafted visualizations helps engage viewers better when watching on YouTube or on television. It is possible to animate Atlas charts, here’s an example where Quartz did so to explain the North American Fair Trade Agreement. However, this is a separate process that involves taking the SVG output from Atlas and animating it using video editing software, so depends on the resources available to the video editing team.
The second training took place on Friday, June 16 with Kenyan Wall Street (KWS). Founded two years ago, the outlet focuses on providing the latest information on the Kenyan financial markets. KWS was co-founded and is managed by Sam Kerosi and Erick Asuma, has amassed quite the following on Twitter, and has risen as an authoritative voice in analyzing financial and market trends.
Atlas is a perfect tool for KWS given that they are always writing about rankings, project valuations, corporate profit and loss margins. One of the questions that came up during the session was whether they could put annotations on the literal charts. This is possible by exporting an image from Atlas and modifying it using Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, or other software. However, the resulting image will not longer automatically resize to fit different size devices. Another option would be to put disclaimers or marginal notes in the chart’s “Description” box.
During the training session, we developed some charts based on some of the trading data available to Kenyan Wall Street.
A few days after the training, Kenyan Wall Street did a story about the growing profits of Air Mauritius, which prominently featured some Atlas Charts.
Both sessions reinforced for us the different ways in which Atlas can be used to make charts illustrating financial or technology trends, tracking incidences of corruptions, or misuse of public funds.
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.
