Datawrapper

Datawrapper is widely used by journalists, and was created by journalists, to

Enrich your stories with charts, maps, and tables.

• It’s free (there is a paid plan but it targets larger organisations)
• It provides well designed and sensible defaults making it easy to create a good-looking chart
• Charts will continue online is you close your account
• Fantastic blog - well worth reading to get you started thinking about what makes a good chart
  • Read In defense of simple charts

Get some data

Go to Figure.NZ and search for Teenage fertility and go to this page

Remember the /data.csv trick - convert the url to https://figure.nz/chart/wYHyiilvB9uCUP8O/data.csv

Get the data to Datawrapper

• You can just upload - or even copy-paste - your data into Datawrapper
• But Figure.NZ + /data.csv lets us use Datawrapper’s Link external dataset feature

Check & Describe

• Click through to the Check & Describe tab

The Check & Describe tab is often where things go wrong

But the easiest way to see if they are correct is just to carry on

• As the prompt says make sure your dates are green and your numbers are blue

Whoops

Head back to Check & Describe and look for columns called Cell X and Cell Y

The Datawrapper extract includes some meta-data to keep track of where the data came from. Hide those columns.

And head back to the Visualize tab

Finally

That looks more like it

Writing time

• Getting the data into a chart is only the beginning
• There are things to play with the improve the visual appearance of your chart
  • Or to make it worse or misleading
• But focus on your words first
  • Why should readers look at this chart?
  • What story is the chart telling?

Start with the alt text

The finished product