While data journalism is often associated with hard science and empirical topics like economics, business, and politics, it’s important to remember that data is omnipresent and can be used to illuminate all kinds of topics, including arts, culture, and lifestyle.

By making use of pulled data, graphical representations, and narrative story-telling, these stories highlight the flexibility of data reporting in human interest subjects, proving that data is all around us—if you know how to look.

1. A look into Stephen Curry’s three-point shooting legacy by the numbers by Mariane Avendaño

This article by Rappler breaks down NBA superstar Stephen Curry’s record-breaking three-point shots, his impact on other players in the league, and professional basketball as a whole. 

Sports is probably one of the most common daily applications of data and data journalism outside of the hard sciences. Breaking down statistics and probabilities into the gameplay and its implications for a team or sport is a great example of how numbers can tell us qualitative information and aid in decision-making.

2. Box office breakup by Samuel Hart

With the help of graphs and theater sales data, Reuters puts together a picture of the rise and fall of the romantic comedy film genre in the United States. As producers, theaters, and audiences embraced a shift to action-packed blockbusters, the charm and humor of rom-coms have struggled to regain the ground it had in the 1990s.

3. Tracking My Kid’s Daycare Bugs in a Virus Data Visualization by Zach Rottman

Turns out data isn’t just for nerds. It’s also for parents in need of some stress management. Using a MySQL table and grid cells for his experiment “My boy is sick,” Rottman logged the days that his toddler, his partner, and Rottman himself fell ill as their son started attending daycare.

What started out as an “art project” for Rottman evolved into something that gave him reassurance. Data—despite or thanks to its matter-of-fact reputation—can give enlightenment into human experiences; those tough days of runny noses and a virus-laden household would be outnumbered by days spent without any medical worry.

4. Wordle, 15 Million Tweets Later by Robert Lesser

If you were online and bored during the pandemic drawl in 2021, you may have played the word game Wordle. The one-game-a-day puzzle took Twitter by storm as players shared their scores to either bemoan or boast about that day’s Wordle.

By using a semi-automated program and Twitter’s API, Robert Lesser lays out how Wordle grew in popularity, the patterns in success—or fail—rates, and whether or not people think it’s been getting harder.

5. Get out of your geographic music bubble by The Pudding 

Much like music tastes, data can be something so personal to each one of us. Released by The Pudding, this data story lays out the most popular song from March 2021. in a viewer’s estimated location to get an idea of what songs are trending within and outside of a “music bubble.” This amazing story takes personalization to a whole new level by approximating your geographical location to see how popular music spreads in patterns and might vary from place to place.

ALSO READ: Five Interactive Stories that Bring Data to Life

Everything we interact with is powered by data in some way. Whether it’s statistical or anecdotal information, we can make use of these points to glean insights and make better decisions and strategies—even if we might think the numbers don’t matter to our field of work. By using data to uncover insights and tell compelling stories, publications demonstrate the power of data to illuminate even the most subjective and intangible aspects of human experience.

M2.0 Communications is a public relations agency that has been helping brands tell meaningful, data-driven narratives. Visit our work to learn more about the brands we collaborate with.

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People are constantly seeking new and innovative ways to understand and analyze data. Through the use of color coding, highlights, animations, and other techniques, interactive data visualization provides a more intuitive way to understand data by allowing users to interact with and explore the data in a dynamic and visually appealing manner. 

In this article, we take a look at five interactive stories on data journalism that are worth reading, showcasing the power and impact of this innovative method of data representation. Whether you’re a data analyst, a journalist, or simply someone who wants to stay informed about the latest trends and developments, these articles are sure to provide valuable insights and inspiration.

1. “What Happens to the Plastic We Throw Out?” by National Geographic

This is an interactive map created by National Geographic to show the global trade flows of plastic waste. It highlights the countries that export and import the most plastic, and provides a visual representation of the global trade networks for plastic waste. The map is designed to raise awareness about the issue of plastic waste and its environmental impact and to encourage people to take action to reduce plastic waste.

2. “Who’s In Your Wallet” by The Pudding

This visual essay covers over 200 banknotes from around the world to observe any patterns in who are the faces of global currencies. The Pudding looks at the gender, occupation, and value of these notes. Using charts, scatter plots, and galleries, readers can scroll through an in-depth look into the history of currencies.

3. “A Disappearing Planet” by ProPublica

This visualization provides an in-depth look at the current state of global wildlife, specifically focusing on the decline in species populations over the past several decades. The visualization allows users to explore data on species populations and distribution, including information on the most endangered species and the impact of human activities on these populations.

4. “Philippines’ performance in Olympics” by Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism

The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism released a report following a historic golden win at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics at the hands of weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz. PCIJ makes use of color-coded graphs and timelines on the performance of Filipino athletes during major sporting events like the Asian and Olympic Games, allowances and financial budgets, and what goes into a gold medal win. 

5. “Always in Best Spirits” by Kontinentalist

Kontinentalist lays out the production and consumption of alcoholic beverages across Asia. There are graphs about the biggest drinkers, grain producers, and top-performing markets. The article also includes galleries of Asian wines, beers, and spirits that readers can filter according to average alcohol percentage and country. Each drink can even be clicked to learn about the history of the drink.

These interactive visualizations showcase the power of this medium to convey complex information in an accessible and engaging way. They offer a unique perspective on important issues and allow readers to engage with the data in new and meaningful ways.

Related Content

• How Data Management Can Boost Brand Reputation
• From Onions to Adobo: How Data Reporting Can Help Us Understand Inflation
• Why Data Visualization is a Powerful Storytelling Tool

M2.0 Communications is a leading communications agency that helps brands creatively tell their stories through data-driven narratives. We offer services including PR advisory, reputation management, influencer management, and video production. Visit our Partners page to learn more about the brands we collaborate with.

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With other opportunities for learning and networking like online courses and social media, it’s become easier than ever for women to break into the industry. Thanks to this, data in 2020 showed that women represented 45 percent of students in STEM fields—a 5 percent increase from 40 percent in 2010. 

However, the added opportunities and larger platforms have also left them vulnerable to the same roadblocks that may have barred them from the industry to begin with.

The struggle for representation

With the rise of online spaces, women now have to navigate both the real-life challenges of the industry and a new set of virtual hurdles—exposing them to the darker side of online harassment and abuse. While it’s easier for women to see and be seen by other women in the field, they may also be exposed to disrespectful comments, harassment, and even the risk of being doxxed. 

One of the most poignant instances of this was Gamergate, the year-long hate campaign against women in the computer science and gaming industry that ran from 2014 to 2015. During this period, members of online gaming communities targeted women under the guise of fighting back against unethical journalism in the gaming industry. They were subjected to disrespectful comments, sexual harassment, and death threats. 

In a broader sense, women in STEM may also be subject to ridicule for being the only woman in the room. Along with the risk of not being taken seriously, they also have to endure isolation from their peers, stereotypes, and a wage gap.

Unfortunately, this treatment could disenfranchise women in the field and discourage more from participating in it. 

However, this also highlights the importance of representation in the field. With the increase in the number of women in STEM, seeing a woman in the industry should ideally be normalized to the point that harassment is no longer a threat. This is especially important for young girls who hope to enter STEM fields in the future. 

The importance of staying online

Despite these challenges and many others, women in STEM persist online. They continue to expand their connections, share knowledge and insights, and advocate for greater diversity and inclusion in the industry. Recognizing the importance of representation, women strive to keep being visible and vocal in these online spaces. 

Hashtags promoting and celebrating their efforts such as #WomenInSTEM, #WomenInScience, and #WomenInTech still have new content coming out each day, especially after the recent International Women’s Day. Last year, the hashtag #spamdecientificas circulated on Colombian Twitter. Directly translating to “female scientist spam,” it allowed Colombian women to boost their reach and stakes in the country’s STEM community.

These hashtags host communities that can provide a space for women to share their experiences, ask for advice, and connect with others who share their interests and goals. These networks can also provide mentorship and career opportunities, helping more women build their skills and advance in their careers.

The increase of women in STEM and the success of these hashtags are a testament to the fact that audiences want to see women succeed. Despite the added disadvantages of online spaces, women have still been able to succeed in their chosen fields, as well as encourage more women and girls to join them there. With this, data from the past two years even shows that women outnumber men as students in colleges. 

Establishing a reputation as an organization that can uplift and empower women can attract more patrons and relevant stakeholders with shared values. 

M2.0 is a public relations and communication agency in the Philippines that offers reputation management and PR advisory services. For 16 years, we have been helping brands tell their stories through meaningful and data-driven narratives.

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In today’s digital landscape, maintaining a positive brand image is crucial for businesses of all sizes. With the vast amount of information available online, consumers can quickly and easily research brands before making purchasing decisions. As a result, companies need to be proactive in managing their reputation to avoid negative consequences.

One critical tool in effective brand reputation management is data. With it, businesses can identify potential threats to their reputation, make informed decisions, and craft a brand image that lines up with the numbers.

Data is a strategic weapon

Numbers can give brand managers a starting point for campaigns by providing valuable insights into emerging opportunities that businesses can capitalize on. Brands that analyze data trends and patterns can identify new consumer needs, emerging markets, or potential partnerships that could lead to growth and success. This knowledge helps businesses determine what sets them apart from competitors and target pain points in their messaging or services.

Data can provide valuable insights into how consumers perceive a brand or an industry. Platform monitoring and brand performance analyses can provide a look into reputation, any issues that the industry is facing, and spaces for growth. Sentiment analysis tools will be greatly helpful in identifying any notable patterns and trends.

Consumers look out for brands that are relatable and seem keen to address their needs. Having data-driven insights will boost your brand as trustworthy and in-tune with what your target audience really needs out of service.

Data can also provide a perspective that those from the inside might not see. A 2022 study by PWC showed that while most businesses believed themselves to be trustworthy, only 30% of consumers felt that way. As consumer trust becomes a key currency, it’s crucial to strategize using evidence-based data, rather than perceptions.

Data can protect you

Reviews, customer feedback, or press coverage are important data points for brands to consider. They can help businesses analyze performance, audience perception, and identify potential problems early. With this information, businesses can take swift action to address the issue and prevent it from escalating further.

Social media has become the place for feedback establishing a robust social media monitoring system. This can involve using social media listening tools to monitor brand mentions, hashtags, and sentiment or conducting regular audits of online reviews on platforms like Facebook and Google. These tools help businesses make informed decisions about their brand. By analyzing consumer feedback and sentiment, businesses can identify areas for improvement and make strategic changes to their products, services, or messaging. This can lead to improved customer satisfaction and a more positive brand image.

Brands can prepare for any potential backlash with a crisis management plan. A standardized process to address controversy or negative feedback can prime businesses to effectively manage their brand value and minimize damage to reputation. This could even help change how your target market perceives your brand.

Boosting brand awareness and reputation management is crucial to stay afloat in today’s social media feedback loop. Businesses can make use of data tools to identify potential threats, make informed decisions, and take necessary actions to maintain a positive image. With the help of best practices and emerging technologies, businesses can stay ahead of the curve and build a strong and positive brand.

M2.0 Communications is a PR agency in the Philippines that offers PR advisory and reputation management services. Through compelling storytelling and meaningful data-driven narratives, M2 has helped our partners tell their brand stories, build their reputation, and create meaningful connections with their target audience.

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We live in a world of lights, colors, and shapes. A study by Changing Minds stated that after three days, people retain 65% of the information presented visually over written or spoken media. Visual representations like photos are also processed by the human brain much faster than text. It’s these facts that have built industries like advertising and graphic design—made more evident with smartphones.

Much like what we see, data is everywhere, and it is growing at an exponential rate. The challenge for businesses and organizations is to make sense of this vast amount of information and use it to drive their decision-making processes.

That’s where interactive data visualization comes in. It provides a way to turn complex data into easily understandable, visual representations.

Interactive data visualization is a way to display data in a graphical form that allows users to interact with the data in real time. This interaction can include filtering, sorting, and zooming in and out on specific data sets.

Make it move

There are several types of interactive data visualization, including heat maps, scatter plots, bar charts, line charts, pie charts, and geographic maps.

Static visualizations are popular and cheaper means of communicating data. But for all their effectiveness, they can be boring, unengaging, and simplistic. Think about the way you might teach a kid a skill like counting. It’s one thing to show them a sequence of numbers (1, 2, 3), but they actually learn through practical methods (having them put fruits into a bag and count every item).

The same can be said for the way we present data. Ideal for large data sets, interactive data visualization is a way to communicate complex issues into easily understandable visual representations that can help drive decision-making processes.

This is because interactive data visualization offers many benefits, including better data understanding, improved communication and decision-making, and increased engagement and user experience.

Interactive data visualization provides a more intuitive way to understand data, making it easier to identify patterns and trends. With the help of things like color coding, highlights, or animations, readers can see for themselves the relationships between variables.

Take, for example, this story by The Pudding about regional divisions in the European Union and their developmental implications. Readers can see for themselves the historical timelines and benefits redetermining borders can do for EU nations.

Talking to wider audiences

Data also tells a story that should reach wide audiences—including those who might be averse to numbers and spreadsheets. Interactive data visualization can make data storytelling more engaging and accessible, which can improve the user experience. By allowing users to interact with the data, visualizations can lead to increased engagement and understanding.

Thinking Machines released an article about the accessibility of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) healthcare in the Philippines wherein they found it takes an average of 3.6 hours to reach a local HIV center. They made use of large data sets like the national population and DOH-recognized HIV centers nationwide to compute estimated travel time.

Rather than presenting this data simply as a static graph or map, Thinking Machine came up with a map of the Philippines with a slider for readers to be able to see the correlation between an area’s population with HIV center accessibility.

Interactive data visualization can help decision-makers communicate data insights and understand the implications of their decisions. A 2018 study in the Australasian Journal of Information Systems found that using interactive data visualization methods made it easier for non-professional investors in accounting to understand the data presented to them.  By presenting data in a visual format, decision-makers can better communicate the key insights to stakeholders, leading to more informed and effective decisions.

Not only does interactive data visualization allow users to interact with and explore the data in a visually appealing manner, but by using interactive data visualization tools, organizations can also make more informed decisions based on data-driven insights and improve their overall performance. 

M2 Communications is a public relations agency in the Philippines that has been helping brands tell their stories using data-driven strategies. Alongside our digital PR and reputation management services, M2 is also a creative agency that offers website design, content creation, graphic design, and video production for brands to communicate with their target audiences. Learn more about our work by visiting our case studies page.

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We all know that living has been getting really expensive—thanks in part to inflation. Gas prices have been up and down because of oil and the invasion of Ukraine. Supply chains for goods have suffered greatly with COVID-19 lockdowns and exportation issues around the world. The price tags on housing, rent, and utilities have pushed people to live with their parents in order to cut costs.

The most evident case study of these: The cost of basic cooking commodities. In the Philippines, onions—a culinary staple—are the most expensive in the world. As of January 13, a kilogram of red onions can go from P350 to P550 per kilogram. There was even a white onion shortage and the threat of a garlic crisis in mid-2022. The Department of Agriculture also announced on January 12, 2023 that eggs now cost P8.70 a piece—45% more expensive than January last year.

“The cost of a kilogram of onions is greater than the minimum wage for a day’s work in the Philippines,” wrote TIME’s reporter Chad De Guzman. Non-agriculture workers earn a minimum wage of Php 500 per day.

Staple items like onions are more expensive than other food items such as whole chicken or beef. A kilogram of a whole chicken is worth Php 180 to Php 220 and a kilogram of beef brisket or rump is worth Php 350 to Php 480. This means that onions are more expensive than some of the other meats that Filipino families might typically purchase.

A single-income family of four would need to spend at least Php 900 to Php 1,100 per day to purchase enough onions and eggs for three meals, assuming they use one kilo of onions and a dozen eggs per day.

For a week’s worth of meals, they would need to spend at least Php 6,300 to Php 7,700 for onions alone. When adding the cost of items such as eggs, the total cost can be quite high.

The visual flavor

A two-part in-depth report by the Philippine Daily Inquirer laid out the current market prices and costs, as well as possible reasons why goods like onions have become so expensive. This included tables about import demand and harvest numbers and is quite the read, thanks to its substance and its length.

We can also make these more digestible by talking from the perspective of everyday situations.

Take into consideration the data we presented above. Let’s translate that into a recipe for the Filipino classic chicken adobo.

Cost approximations

Based on the data provided by the Department of Agriculture, it would cost approximately Php 275 to make the adobo recipe—just from the chicken, garlic, and onions alone. That doesn’t include rice which clocks in at about P40 per kilo. You might say “that doesn’t seem so bad. Adobo can last a family of 4 or 5 the whole week!”

But consider that in August, the Philippine Statistics Office said they won’t consider a family of 5 poor if they spend more than P18.62 per meal. This means eating the bare minimum in smaller portions to get you through the grueling 24 hours of life in the Philippines. Easier said than done, as one Filipino Youtuber found in his experiment.

Numbers talk. Make them tell a story.

Inflation can also be hard to understand and boring, especially if you’re like me and can barely make it through the opening paragraphs of business news. However, data is also essential to understand so we can make sense of why things are the way they are. That’s why it’s important to explore the different ways we can talk about data.

To make it more interesting for readers, it is important to present the information in a clear and concise manner and to provide examples that are relatable to the reader. For instance, by using everyday examples, such as the cost of a loaf of bread or a kilo of onions, and how it has changed over time, readers can easily understand the impact of inflation on their lives.

Visual aids like graphs or charts can be helpful in illustrating the trend of economic indicators over time, and providing context by comparing the current data to historical averages can help readers understand the significance of the data. It’s also good to explore creative executions like the receipt to make the data look more digestible to an average reader.

This type of data reporting can help readers understand the impact of rising food costs on their lives and budget. It brings the issue closer to readers by making it relatable and understandable and can help them see the impact on their own daily lives. By highlighting the cost of specific food items and comparing them to other food items, readers can see how much they would have to save to afford a week’s worth of meals.

Remember: Data literacy is not just for people who work in finance or business, but for anyone who wants to make informed decisions about their money and their future. By understanding economic indicators, we can make better decisions about our finances and take steps to protect ourselves from economic downturns.

M2.0 Communications’ data-driven strategies allow us to remain as one of the top PR agencies in the Philippines. Through media analytics, we help brands creatively tell their narratives with an evidence-based approach. M2 also provides services including PR advisory, reputation management, crisis communication, and stakeholder engagement.

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