March 10, 2021
DataStories, the international project financed by Google seeks to provide a solution that will equip journalists with skills required for data journalism, enabling them to analyse flows of data and bring sense and structure to it. The project’s aim was to bring the most important and useful automation tools together in one platform, in order to understand the data by the seamless integration of large amounts of open data from different data sources, which will enable the user to easily access data on-demand. Secondly, the tool allows a visual exploration and combination of data into meaningful stories.
The project came to an end in November 2020 and the final prototype of the DataStories platformwas recently made available. The DataStories platform enables users to get the “gist” of datasets, to search datasets by interactively “drilling down” offering comprehensive, interactive, and inter-connected facets/filters. Additionally, the platform provides dashboards with ready-to-be-used visualisations, enables reusability through sharing and exporting of visualisations/dataset slices and provides tools for editing and sharing data-driven stories.
To test platform effectiveness, a user evaluation survey was performed in October 2020. DataStories pre-final platform has been evaluated on querying and story-telling scenarios, where most of the users were satisfied with the easiness of finding and exporting the information, the responsiveness and usefulness of the platform.
A tutorial video of the platform is available to view here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQcr89H5EMw