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.

With a career that “tracked alongside the major technological developments in and out of the newsroom” Alberto Cairo was described in a Microsoft / Story Labs profile 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 will 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 in order to inform discussions about issues of public interest, every story will also be paired with visualization “notes”— a second, more theoretical article introducing the reader to the language of visualization.

Story 1 + Notes 1

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 + Notes 2

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.

 

Story 3 + Notes 3

Story 3 “No Place Like Home“ explores travel preferences within the European Union. It presents an example of how high-value tourism datasets can be visualized to reveal trends over time, such as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on travel within and between EU Member States. The header image shows that 90% of the French vacationed in their own country (between 2012 and 2023), indicating the concentration by destination.

Notes 3 “Visualising Change and Flow“ emphasizes the importance of, when building a data-driven narrative, connecting every step to its previous and following ones. Cairo encourages data visualizers not to simply load the numbers into a software tool and let the program decide which type of chart to use. Also, he suggests, do not go with your first instinct. Rather, think of the chart that you are designing as a tool for understanding. What do you want readers to see in your chart? What is its intended goal? And make your choice of charts, graphs, or maps based on the answers to those questions.

Stories + Notes  4 and 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.