All countries within the European Union (EU) are required to generate special “high-value data sets” and to make them publicly available under the official portal for European data: data.europa.eu. These data sets include things like level of risk, such as poverty, inequality, unemployment, etc. In order to make the data more approachable, the EU looked to IDSC  Visualization program director, Dr. Alberto Cairo.

“Tracked alongside the major technological developments in and out of the newsroom” Alberto Cairo was described in a Microsoft / Story Labs profile as having spent “his entire career in the vanguard of visual journalism.” A renowned visualization designer and art director with many years of experience leading graphics and visualization teams, Cairo was approached to art direct a series of stories that highlight five EU high-value data sets.

Tasked with giving visibility to the data sets through a narrative that could serve as an example of what can be done with the data to inform discussions about issues of public interest, every story was also to be paired with visualization “notes”— a more theoretical article introducing the reader to the language of visualization.

Published in November of 2024, Story 1 “What Water Can Take From Us: Visualizing flooding risk in Spain through high-value datasets” looked at the entire country of Spain, visualizing regional fluvial flooding. After scrolling through a series of maps depicting the risk by region, the story engaged the reader by allowing them to enter their location thereby giving some frame of reference to the magnitude of flooding within a familiar context.

Its accompanying visualization Notes 1 “The Power of Data Visualization: How visualization allows us to reason through data” introduces the reader to the power of visualization, the art of representing data through different type of charts, such as bar graphs, line graphs, pie charts, or maps to help readers detect patterns and trends in numbers.

Story 2 “Everyone’s Busy—But not Equally: Time expenditure and income equality through high-value datasets” looks at how Europeans (by country) use their time as correlated to income inequality. The accompanying Notes 2 “Association, Aggregation, and Causation” explains scatter plots and how to read—and not misinterpret—data sets. Stories 3-5 are still in the works.

Beyond giving visibility to these EU high-value data sets, Cairo explained, the stories and notes can show journalists, decision makers, etc. what can be done with these types of data sets. Whether narrative or more interactive projects, he hopes the Stories as examples will expand people’s imaginations and open up the possibilities as to what kind of creative projects can be made. At the same time, the Notes will fulfill the EU’s educational goal by teaching the language of data visualization itself.

Working in cooperation with the Publications Office of the European Union, as art director, Cairo leads a team that includes Brazilian co-designer Rodolfo Almeida. The development—the interactions themselves, the coding—are by a Mexican computer scientist, mathematician, and coder Gilberto Leon.