By Galvin Zaldivar
Data journalism is more than facts and figures, charts and tables. More than statistics and balance sheets, data can be used to tell a huge variety of stories.
The third annual Data Driven symposium, hosted by Humber’s Faculty of Media and Creative Arts (FMCA), was held on Nov. 15 at Google Canada’s Toronto Headquarters.
Started in 2017 by David Weisz and Andrew Ainsworth, Data Driven is a chance to have an in-depth look into the strategies and techniques to turn raw data into tomorrow’s headlines. Investigative and data journalists shared stories they have been able to tell through the use of data.
Guillermo Acosta, Dean of FMCA, said this year’s symposium was very interesting.
“I was so struck by the depth of the work that is being done and I was struck by the power of the women working behind this, the power of the diversity and the that is present in this field of Journalism,” he said.
Acosta said his appreciation has grown for the field. “The big learning moment for me was the first one and the second and third I’ve seen the evolution.”
Counting trees
Toronto Star data journalist Megan Ogilvie said she was eager to tell a hard-hitting story that was going to change the world.
“So, I pitched a story on trees,” she told the audience.
The story stemmed from a story concerning a 300-year-old oak tree, Ogilvie said that she noticed how engaged Star readers became with the story, and began to see a story behind it.
“I thought, ‘surely there’s more than one 300-year-old tree in the city, where are they,
Kit Kolbegger spoke at the 2019 Data Driven symposium on their experiences with the National Student Investigative Reporter Network. Photo by Galvin Zaldivar.
can we talk to our readers about it?’’ she said. As with all good data stories, Ogilvie said she started by looking for who would have data on the old-growth trees in Toronto.
In searching for the data needed to tell the story, she said the story changed as she began to sort through the numbers.
“In the end, the story became more of a look at how we’re not really doing a really good job of keeping track of big, old, important trees in the city,” Ogilvie said.
As with all data stories, there were data holes and problems that had on caring for old-growth trees in Toronto, and how the city could improve.
“In the story, we pointed out in the story why Toronto should and could be doing more,” Ogilvie said.
She said the Star looked at the U.K.’s heritage tree program, which keeps track of 150,000 old-growth trees, and New York City’s heritage tree registry as examples of how Toronto could take care of its old growth trees.
“When you talk about trees, you have to show these trees,” she said. “We picked 10 beautiful trees to show our readers with a neat video and interactive format so they could meet some of these really special trees in the city.”
The response to the story was amazing ac- cording to Ogilvie, with people sending in their stories about their favourite tree in the city. “Just like we do, we follow the readers’ stories and a few days later we profiled five more trees in the Star,” she said.
This led to Ogilvie compiling a weekly feature called Tree of the Week which gave Torontonians the chance to share stories about their favourite trees.
“We had readers telling us how much they loved it and how it was important to high- light the beautiful things in their city because it gave them a sense of connection to their neighbours, their neighbourhood, their community,” she said.
A rough ride
Annie Burns-Pieper of the Globe and Mail spoke of her research into sexual violence on public transit, and how the data she received influenced the story she told.
“This is a story that came to me as a woman living in Toronto, an investigative reporter, who took public transit a lot,” she said.
When Burns-Pieper started her investigation, she knew other outlets had covered the issue in the past and assumed the data would be readily available.
“This investigation ended up taking three years of my life,” she said. “And the story ended up being much different than the one I thought I was going to tell.”
After going through the data of the 22 largest transit systems in the country, and their local police services, Burns-Pieper said she discovered many data gaps in the way local police forces and transit systems recorded in- stances of sexual violence.
“At the same time, I was collecting data on this story, I was talking to survivors of sexual violence on public transit,” she said. “I spoke to over 50 people during the course of the re- porting, mostly young women.”
Among the cases Burns-Pieper examined was a Calgary incident that was well known to police, the city and the transit system, but was not included in the transit system’s own data on sexual violence.
“I was confused,” she said. “I didn’t know how a story that had been reported in multiple news outlets and was well known to the police was missing from the transit system’s data.”
Looking through her data, Burns-Pieper discovered multiple instances of sexual vio- lence being reported to transit authorities, but not being reflected in the data.
Burns-Pieper said the missing data then became part of the story, and knowing what’s missing can influence the direction a story may take.
Let the numbers talk
Michael Robinson of the Telegraph-Journal out of New Brunswick spoke of creating stories with limited data.
Robinson’s story was on the deficiencies of the billing number system formerly used by New Brunswick to assign doctors to an appropriate region.
“There wasn’t a lot of pivot tables or data crunching but just simply showing those numbers…we really let the numbers speak for itself,” he said.
Robinson said that despite the simple nature of the data, he was able to illustrate the issues with the billing number system to effect real change.
She said her data journalism professor said the real power of data is made manifest when you put two sets of data together and look at the similarities to find a new angle and perspective.
“I’m thinking about how to do that,” Sun said. “I like to bake, so I’m thinking about this story as baking a blueberry pie.”
Think about each component data set as a piece of the pie, she said. The income level can be seen as the pie crust, and each collision as a single blueberry that forms the filling.
“For my story, those blueberries [were] distributed disproportionately all over the city,” Sun said.
Sun found 53.1 per cent more pedestrian-involved collisions happened in the poorest neighbourhoods than in the richest. She also found that jaywalking and crossing with the right of way were the top two causes of collisions in the lowest income areas.
Sun told the Data Driven audience that census data is the best gift a data journalist can get. Using census data, journalists can reveal systemic programs and model emerging social trends.
“You can use census data to empower your story and to make your blueberry pie,”she said.
Can’t see the forest
John Wihbey of Northeastern University also had a story to tell about trees but to illustrate the importance of immigration to the history of the United States.
“We decided that in the atmosphere that is currently in the United States issuing from the Trump administration, that we want to tell a different story,” he said.
Instead of depicting the data linearly, Wihbey and his partner Pedro Cruz, looked to nature for their data visualization.
“We also have to acknowledge that the traditional forms for data storytelling, whether it’s bar charts or line graphs are maybe insufficient.
“The story can show how you can do a lot with little, and eventually we hammered this issue so hard that when the Throne Speech came around for the new Progressive Conservative government last fall they promised to scrap the system…and that finally happened this past September,” he said.
Putting it together
Freelance data journalist Yang Sun showed the audience how to bake a blueberry pie with data. Or more accurately, creating a story out of two separate sets of data.
“Since I have a lot of opinions with the traffic in Toronto as a pedestrian, the first project I hit is the collision data released by the Toronto police,” she said.
The next data Sun looked at was the median household income in the greater golden horseshoe region. She said that looking at the two data sets she had a hunch.
“I feel like some of the lowest income neighbourhoods happen to be sitting on those clusters with collisions,” Sun said.
She said her data journalism professor said the real power of data is made manifest when you put two sets of data together and look at the similarities to find a new angle and perspective.
“I’m thinking about how to do that,” Sun said. “I like to bake, so I’m thinking about this story as baking a blueberry pie.”
Think about each component data set as a piece of the pie, she said. The income level can be seen as the pie crust, and each collision as a single blueberry that forms the filling.
“For my story, those blueberries [were] distributed disproportionately all over the city,” Sun said.
Sun found that 53.1 per cent more pedestrian-involved collisions happened in the poorest neighbourhoods than in the richest. She also found that jaywalking and crossing with the right of way were the top two causes of collisions in the lowest income areas.
Sun told the Data Driven audience that census data is the best gift a data journalist can get. Using census data, journalists can reveal systemic programs and model emerging social trends.
“You can use census data to empower your story and to make your blueberry pie,” she said.
Can’t see the forest
John Wihbey of Northeastern University also had a story to tell about trees, but to illustrate the importance of immigration to the history of the United States.
“We decided that in the atmosphere that is currently in the United States issuing from the Trump administration, that we want to tell a different story,” he said.
Instead of depicting the data linearly, Wihbey and his partner Pedro Cruz, looked to nature for their data visualization.
“We also have to acknowledge that the traditional forms for data storytelling, whether it’s bar charts or line graphs are maybe insufficient sometimes to tell the real story and to bring around the kind of emotional impact that we want,” he said.
Eventually, the pair settled on using tree rings to visualize and illustrate their data.
“If you think about it, [tree rings] capture data over time,” Wihbey said, explaining the logic behind the choice. “Seasonal patterns, and patterns of nutrition and growth and we thought, ‘you know there’s something analogous actually with the population.’”
After much testing and working through various algorithms, Wihbey and Cruz settled on a more subtle colour palette after rejecting red, white and blue as jingoistic, he said, when he released a preview of the data, he found the response interesting.
“We saw people from both the political left and the political right … being kind of inspired and sort of exploring the data and commenting on it,” Wihbey said. “We thought that maybe by using visual metaphor as opposed to conventional data storytelling techniques we had maybe gotten people to think a little differently about the country.”
Following the water
Kit Kolbegger, a journalist at the CBC and Humber grad, spoke of their experience working with the National Student Investigative Research Network (NSIRN). The network’s investigation, Tainted Water, caught international attention when it was released on Nov. 4.
“We were a very small team at Humber,” Kolbegger said. “We started out with just me and Michelle [Rowe-Jardine] and then in the second semester, a post-grad, Brenden Pietroban, came on to join us.”
When the investigation became focused on lead, the Humber team found themselves investigating Thunder Bay. NSIRN, evidently thought Thunder Bay was much closer to Toronto than it actually was, said Kolbegger.
“As we started investigating in Thunder Bay, we found massive pushback from the city itself,” they said. “I filed those nine access to information requests, and I would call the city archivist … and I would say, ‘Hey what’s the update?’ and he would say, ‘They’re having another meeting,’”
At one point Kolbegger said they requested a map of Thunder Bay’s water infrastructure, only to be told the city didn’t have one.
“It was a huge challenge,” Kolbegger said. “So what we ended up doing … was going through this huge deep dive.”
Kolbegger said they and their team went through local news outlets, local Facebook groups, real estate listings, Google street view walks and local podcasts
“I had the book, Seven Fallen Feathers, on my bookshelf, unread,” Kolbegger said. “Doing this googling, the book came up, and it actually talked about this one high school in Thunder Bay, that had a Ukrainian boiler from the 1950s, and looking into Ukrainian legislation on lead … we realized that this school could have a significant lead problem.”
After finding the data, Kolbegger said the next step was finding the people behind the numbers.
“No story has impact without stakeholders,” they said. “And again, without being in Thunder Bay, how do you do that?”
Looking through places like social media and online petitions, the Humber team found Rhonda Hannah, and her partner, who re-excavated their home’s pipes by hand because of the expense. After moving to a house, they discovered another 20 metres of lead pipes in their new home.
“This solidified the need to tell this story,” said Kolbegger. “We found this huge disparity across the country, in how different municipalities are dealing with the issue of lead pipes. Because most municipalities do have lead pipes somewhere in their water.”
Acosta said he sees a multi-disciplinary approach to data-driven storytelling in the future. “I want to see this expanded beyond journalism and to communications in general be- cause I think this is a good this can be very important for public relations and for advertising and for marketing,” he said. “I’m in this personal, call it [a] search for truth or personal Crusade on restoring faith in communications in general.”