Orb Media: Fighting Blind

Creative Brief

Crafted Product

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Link to → Fighting Blind For a multimedia storytelling essay about protest and politics, I created charts and illustrations. I worked closely with the team at Orb Media to make these visualizations in English. I also created them in Spanish, Arabic, and Portuguese. In addition, I created social media assets to draw people to the essay.

Story

Fighting Blind - Orb Media

Inside a busy roadside restaurant in the Central Java town of Solo in Indonesia, Joko Tri Harmanto scooped strips of breaded tempeh from oil sizzling in a blackened wok early on a recent Saturday morning. Next to him, a friend poured cups of steaming broth over bowls of rice to make a soup called sotos.

orbmedia.org

Data

Fighting Blind Data - Orb Media

There is no universally agreed upon definition of terrorism. While a few broad elements of what defines a terrorist act (such as the intentional use of violence) are widely agreed upon, many other elements (such as whether the victims of terrorism must be noncombatants or non-governmental, or whether terrorism requires a political motive) are in open debate.

orbmedia.org

Examples of some of the graphics

Goal

Orb Media is an international nonprofit journalism organization. Orb is on the leading edge of journalism by offering rich data analysis, accompanied by multimedia.

Each story at Orb can be viewed in editorial mode, for a general audience, and in a data mode for an audience of experts. I designed illustrations and graphics for the feature stories Generation Activist and Fighting Blind, and I also designed the charts for the data reports. I also created the social media 'snackables' for both projects.

Role

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My roles: Art Direction & Illustration (for feature story); Data Visualization (for data story); Graphic Design (social media 'snackables'); Foreign Language Production (for all assets in Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic).

Process

Discovery

Observations

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The Orb team was developing a graphic style appropriate for the serious subject matter, terrorism. I picked up on the theme of shattered glass to make the information graphics.

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I was told to work closely with the video team on this story, and it became evident that we working on an integrated package for visual storytelling.

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I worked with data from the survey and other sources provided in the Data report by Orb. Some of the takeaways I discovered: there is a small but significant upward trend in people accepting violence against civilians to achieve political goals. There are also more countries experiencing terrorist events. Another interesting takeaway: there's a correlation in countries between terrorist activities and state-sponsored violence. All of these takeaways needed to be made visual through charts. More information about the data, in Orb's words, is here:

The data used in this Orb Media counterterrorism story are drawn from five primary sources.

Data Source 1: START Global Terrorism Database. This is an in-depth, detailed database on the nature and counts of terrorism events globally since the early 1970s.

This dataset is used to calculate the count of terrorist acts, the count of deaths from terrorism, and the number of countries with terrorist events within their borders.
We are using five-year averages for most counts and percent changes. Data from individual years is also available as needed.
This data covers almost all countries.

Data Source 2: Gallup World Poll is a global attitude and opinion database containing representative randomly sampled populations from over 160 countries.

This dataset is used to assess the population’s attitudes toward the moral acceptability for groups to use violence targeting civilians.
The data includes respondents from 64 countries over the years 2005 - 2012 (not all countries for all years). The complete country list for respondents to this poll can be found here.
This dataset includes 259,782 responses.

Data Source 3: Pew Global Attitudes Survey is a randomly selected sample of respondents from a diverse set of countries.

This dataset is being used to assess the level of concern a population has about the threat of terrorism toward their country.
The data includes respondents from 55 countries over the years 2002 - 2016 (not all countries for all years). The complete country list for respondents to this poll can be found here.
This dataset includes 451,324 responses.

Data Source 4: The Global Barometer social surveys are a randomly selected sample of respondents from a diverse set of countries.

This dataset is used to assess the level of concern a population has about the threat of terrorism toward their country.
The data includes respondents from 55 countries over the years 2005 - 2017 (not all countries for all years). The complete country list for respondents to this poll can be found here.
This dataset includes 224,047 responses.

Data Source 5: Proprietary Attitudes and Opinion Survey. Orb has worked with several outlets, including Survey Monkey and IPSOS, to conduct a 2018 survey on opinions and attitudes about terrorism and violence.

This survey collected 23,674 responses through a combination of randomly selected and representative respondents and convenience samples of respondents.
This data was collected on a global scale and includes the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Mexico, Myanmar (Burma), Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Korea, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Statistical Methodology

All of the data has been weighted using rake weighting and post-stratification weights based on the most recent population-level data available to us. Bayesian hierarchical modeling and mixed-effects semi-parametric modeling were used to calculate changes and trends. The analysis was done using the R package for statistical programming version 3.5.1

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Link to → Discovery Sketches Conversation

Concepts → Blueprint

Concept samples

Story

illustration-story.pdf568.8KB

Data

Sketch before drilling down to country-level data:

illustration-1-rough.pdf81.9KB

illustration-2-rough.pdf126.1KB

illustration-3-rough.pdf448.5KB

Examples of Blueprints for foreign languages

Reflection

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As a nonprofit, Orb takes a step into the relatively new world of convergent journalism. Here, writing, video, data visualization come together to tell a story that we can understand from multiple angles. As someone who writes, this is one of my primary interests in practicing data visualization. I appreciate when visualizations work in concert with a long-form essay to create an improved reading experience. They don't need to be the main events. The main event remains the ensemble of writing and pictures, working together. I also appreciate the inclusive design that Orb offers, even if all the formats became a lot of work. Sometimes, readers need to change languages for an easier read and to see a story and a data side. The more ways to get on board with the writing, the better.