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Making data accessible and understandable

by Max Roser

16/2/2023 – prepared for an internal presentation at the WHO

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  • One of the key indicators of malnutrition
  • 22% of the world’s children suffer from it

Understanding global hunger: stunted growth

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How many children suffer from stunted growth?

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Exhibits in our museum are presented like this

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How can we allow our readers to understand the data we are presenting?

How can we do better?

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Data 🔗 Technical Text

Making the world’s most important data accessible and understandable.

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What is Technical Text?

Technical Text is all that text that is necessary to understand the visualized metric.��It includes:

  • Title, subtitle, etc.
  • The definition of the metric,
  • The definition of the unit of measurement.
  • The measurement method,
  • Any caveats and problems with the data
    • Caveats on the accuracy of the metric, warnings on how the data could be misinterpreted, problems of particular sources.

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For non-experts, most metrics we present are not understandable.

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An example of technical text

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Our museum looks a bit like this

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Data 🔗 Technical Text

→ The goal: wherever a particular metric is visualized all relevant technical text should be available in an unmissable way.

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Project Otto

I’d like our museum to look like that:

Data from a different source

Absolute numbers instead of rates

Exploratory-View 🔗 Technical Text 🔗 Data-Insights�Not more than one click away

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Technical Text

Stunting has declined by 20%

More boys than girls suffer from stunting

Stunting is most common in Africa

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