Interactive data visualisation told the Brexit story

Jeremy Hurter

“Data visualisation is used in the business space and is still relatively ‘new’ in the South African online news media. This amazing tool is gaining traction quickly, because people can see the value in being able to transform raw data, from its boring and often difficult to understand natural form, to something that everybody can easily digest,” explains Jeremy Hurter, CFO of BIPB, a company specialising in business intelligence.

“Brexit demonstrated this beautifully, because many of the online articles used data visualisation to show exactly how the voting turned out geographically. Furthermore, these maps were interactive and any user could find out detailed information just by hovering their mouse over a point of interest. These tools were used to show things such as how different areas of the UK voted and the demographics of the people who voted to stay in or leave the EU. Not only was the average online reader able to make sense of this information faster, but it also allowed them the opportunity to observe interesting patterns that wouldn’t be apparent from looking only at statistics. They could also make themselves part of the story by clicking on their town.”

A number of media, such as the BBC, The Guardian, City Metric, The Telegraph and The Financial Times used JavaScript libraries such as D3.js to create intricate, informative, visually appealing and, most importantly, interactive maps, charts and scatter plot graphs to communicate the story of the Brexit referendum.

D3.js is a JavaScript library for producing dynamic, interactive visualisations in web browsers. It makes use of the widely implemented SVG, HTML5 and CSS standards. D3.js puts emphasis on web standards and gives people the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying them to a proprietary framework. This combines powerful visualisation components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.

Hurter believes that with media moving more into a digital space and away from print, data visualisation tools allow for the opportunity for information to become more interactive and personal to the reader/user. Maps are an important part of this visualisation, particularly when it comes to stories around voting, polls and elections.

Use for local elections

“Incorporating data visualisation into the news is revolutionary. As we saw with Brexit, readers could instantly go from seeing the bigger picture of voting, to narrowing right down to information about the split of voting in their own towns. I suspect we will see our local media making use of this great storytelling tool with the upcoming elections in South Africa," concludes Hurter.

Established in 2010 by Greg Guye and Matthew Mottram, BIPB is now a B-BEE level 1 contributor and part of the Keyrus Group, an international player in consulting and technologies and a specialist in data and digital.