In data science, the result is often a report or a story that aims to influence people’s behavior or company decisions. No matter whether you are a journalist writing an article about government spending or an analyst producing internal sales reports, you are telling stories with data.
Being able to tell stories with data (but also verify and assess other people’s stories that
can be backed by data) is becoming a vital skill in the modern world, which is why this
topic is extremely important and also interesting. To do this currently, you need to be a
skilled programmer, great designer and good storyteller, all at the same time!
The Gamma is a project that aims to make open, transparent data-driven storytelling easier and more accessible. If you want to read more about the motivation about the project, have a look at the The Gamma and Digital News Innovation Fund announcement.
Projects and other resources
Visualizing Olympic Medals
This project shows a second iteration of The Gamma. You can explore a number of interactive visualizations built around the Olympic medals data set. Code for all the visualizations can be run, modified and shared from the browser.
See the project live and explore the data on your own! You can find more about the work in an associated blog post and the source code is also available on GitHub. The work was one of the Top 10 most popular data journalism projects of the week!
World Bank Carbon Emissions
This project was an early experiment built around the F# language and a type provider for World Bank data. The Carbon Emissions report is an example interactive article built using the prototype. It takes some time to load, but you can also watch a 15 minute demo or a 45 minute talk about the project.
For more information about the project, see our Computation + Journalism 2015 paper, which explains the early thinking behind The Gamma and interesting technical aspects of the prototype.
Talks and slides
Towards open and transparent data-driven storytelling
This is a talk about The Gamma project done at the Alan Turing Institute, which is kindly hosting the development of the project. The development of social media has democratized opinions - meaning that sharing your beliefs has become significantly easier. Can simplifying data-driven storytelling democratize facts backed by data?
The Gamma: Programming Tools for Data Journalism
This talk from the Future Programming workshop talks about some of the more technical aspects of The Gamma project and its early prototypes. The key idea of the talk is that we should see articles as programs - this way, we can apply many great ideas from programming to verify articles and make them easier to create!
