My Data Visuals Internship with The Texas Tribune
— Lauren Flannery
The most important thing I learned during my semester as an Interactive Data and Visuals fellow at The Texas Tribune is pretty simple: Namely, that I can do this job. That a little overconfidence helps. That the struggle is part of the process. That people come to this field from many different paths and understand what it’s like to tackle something new.
Most of the battle is overcoming uncertainty on how to do something new. The rest is, to greatly oversimplify, just making things. And that’s always fun. To speak directly to the “making things” part of data visualization, here’s what else I learned during my four months at The Texas Tribune:
1. Will it float?
There is a lot of data in the world. If it’s your job to look at data, you probably find most of it fascinating. The problem is that in order to tell a story, data has to be more than fascinating to you; it also has to be fascinating to other people.
I found it helpful to think of data as undergoing a “will it float” test. After cleaning and looking at trends, I would talk to a reporter or a member of the data visuals team to see if any of the findings were interesting to people other than myself. Sometimes the idea would float as an interesting one, and sometimes it would have been data for data’s sake and not all that important to the article.
For example, Jordan Rudner, another Tribune fellow, and I spent time looking at crime on UT campus. It’s not exactly breaking news to say that crime occurs at college, but the longer we wrestled with the data we found that many incidents occurred around an empty lot along West Campus. The story and graphic ended up helping highlight the homelessness and drug problem that the campus faced and helped give a particular call to action after the murder of a university student.
2. Show your work
Getting feedback from the team during the coding bits proved to be really helpful. It helped me keep fresh eyes on my project and to not become too entrenched with one idea.
Also, showing my work around gave me a lot of insight about design. Namely, to quit putting borders around every single thing. Less is more, it turns out. Every time I asked the art department for a few minutes of feedback, my projects greatly improved. The process of being open to critique and sometimes having to kill your darlings during a project always ended with me making something better, even if it was 10 p.m. on primary election night.
3. Keep your eyes open to everyone else’s work
Watching what everyone else on the data visuals team was working on would often lend me some mid-week inspiration, and also gave me an idea into what the Tribune considered long and short-term projects. It gave me scope of what new things I would be able to try, and the time that it would take to build it. Lastly, becoming familiar with the team’s past graphics gave me the courage to pitch new ideas to reporters because I knew that I could see how another team member built something, and use it as a template to help me if I got stuck.
The Tribune was the first news organization that I worked at that had a data visuals team, and watching and working alongside such great reporters and developers gave me such an appreciation for all the ways that data can help reveal a story. Thanks to everyone at The Texas Tribune for a fantastic semester!