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In this week's newsletter, we take a look at Coronavirus visualisations.
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The new Coronavirus and the spread of Covid-19 has offered an interesting collection of journalistic visualisations, as newsrooms across the globe work on the same handful of datasets of infections, travels, and trade.
South China Morning Post has a number of impressive infographics on the virus. But more importantly, they avoid the pitfalls of being too fancy. In an ongoing crisis like this readers’ primary need is information, and when it comes to information, classical, familiar chart types are unbeatable. A simple bar chart or table usually requires much less cognitive work to parse, than a novel format. Here is a long-read that includes many of the infographics from SCMP:
https://multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/news/china/article/3047038/wuhan-virus/index.html
Reuters did a visualisation of how covid-19 spread out in South Korea, and especially after the infamous patient #31:
https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-SOUTHKOREA-CLUSTERS/0100B5G33SB/index.html
It should be noted that coverage like this is enabled by the very detailed information on registered cases provided by Korean authorities. The sharing of fine grained information has not been without issues, as the Guardian explains:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/06/more-scary-than-coronavirus-south-koreas-health-alerts-expose-private-lives
Washington Post did a game-of-life-style visualisation of not just how viruses spread, but also how the spread slows down or stops:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/health/coronavirus-how-epidemics-spread-and-end/
Carbon Brief has looked at coal consumptions, and other indicators for industrial activities, to estimate how big an impact the Corona response has had on CO₂ emissions:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coronavirus-has-temporarily-reduced-chinas-co2-emissions-by-a-quarter
Finally: Among all the events cancelled due to the Corona outbreak is, sadly, the Journalism Festival in Perugia.
https://www.journalismfestival.com/news/cancellation-of-the-2020-international-journalism-festival/
Have you seen other noteworthy data-driven takes on the new Coronavirus? Let us know at stockholm@jplusplus.org, and we'll highlight them in upcoming newsletters!
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In other news
Welcome back in business, Linnéa Jonjons, Jack Werner, and Åsa Larsson! The trio who once founded the first major Swedish fact-checking-as-a-format initiative Viralgranskaren at the now defunct Swedish Metro, just started a stand-alone, independent fact checking site: Källkritikbyrån (the Fact Checking Bureau)
https://kallkritikbyran.se
Another welcome debute is The Markup, an online magazine for data-driven investigation that is finally back online after much controversy.
https://themarkup.org
We are looking forward to following them both!
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From J++ and Newsworthy
Yes, the winter has been very warm, but just how warm? Newsworthy teamed up with the Swedish public service radio to analyse temperature data, locally. Here, for instance, are charts for the town of Kalmar:
https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/7422406
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Tools
Deepnote is a brand new tool aimed at replacing Jupyter Notebooks. It promises to overcome some of the issues we and others have with Jupyter, such as lack of proper version tracking, and opaqueness of internal state (what is actually stored in a variable at a given time?), while at the same time introducing things like collaborative editing. From a first look, we find it very promising, though many features are not yet there.
Anthony Agnone at the Life with Data blog did a longer write-up here: https://towardsdatascience.com/deepnote-sets-course-to-become-the-jupyter-killer-d0cb6e3ca011
https://www.deepnote.com
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