Technologists and journalists have more in common than you might think. Both use data to ask interesting questions, tell compelling stories, and help people understand patterns and trends. Increasingly, as data become available that quantify ever-wider aspects of the human experience, journalists are joining technologists — like the analysts and developers at Azavea — in the practice of mining and visualizing large and diffuse datasets. The two worlds are colliding in exciting ways, and Azavea is thrilled to be helping news organizations re-imagine themselves in the 21st century.
A great example is the WHYY NewsWorks project, a fusion of traditional reporting from experienced journalists, crowdsourced data collection and story telling from readers and citizen journalists, and powerful data visualizations from technologists. WHYY made a big move into the world of online journalism with the launch of NewsWorks in November 2010. As a NewsWorks technology partner, Azavea developed a community mapping tool called Civic Atlas. Civic Atlas allows NewsWorks’ readers to search for thousands of community assets across the region, including social service organizations, educational organizations, schools, daycare centers, and more. ”Civic Altas helps put community assets and community news in a collaborative context,” says Carissa Brittain, one of the software developers at Azavea who worked on the project. “News is always about the where, but knowing what else is around, and what else is going on nearby, can also be very useful.” An upcoming feature of Civic Altas, she adds, “is to bring community members’ stories about a place or an organization into a larger shared space — a public map of local news.”
Civic Atlas was constructed using a number of freely available software building blocks, including: the DoJo toolkit for the user interface, the Open Layers mapping library, the PostgreSQL database to store the community asset data, and GeoServer to share layers of transportation data. The project also uses tools from Azavea’s Common Libraries, including a data aggregator that clusters community assets on the map based on the extent of a search area and the distance between assets.
The community asset data, collected by the staff at DVAEYC, the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children, was originally part of a service called Connect 211, built by Azavea in 2008. The project was looking for a new home right around the time Chris Satullo, Director of News and Civic Engagement at WHYY, was beginning plans for NewsWorks. By mid-2010, Satullo had enthusiastically adopted the mapping tool, renaming it Civic Atlas and making it a key feature of NewsWorks.
This is not Azavea’s first time partnering with journalists. Reporters at The Oregonion have been using the Cicero API in their political coverage since the 2008 election. Journalists from the Daily News, City Paper, and the Philadelphia Inquirer have used Azavea’s maps to tell stories about topics as diverse as redistricting, property foreclosures, and walkability. This October, Azavea staff participated in conversations about the future of online journalism at the Online News Association conference in Washington DC. Both print and online journalists have been particularly interested in our Redistricting the Nation project, which was created in 2009 to help citizens visualize the shape of political districts and understand the process of redistricting.
