Nieman highlights Chattarati education project
Nieman Journalism Lab recently ran a story on a Chattarati project being headed up by Aaron Collier and DJ Trischler. The project, tentatively dubbed Visual Report Card, dives into the data that Tennessee uses to measure local school performance and, through infographics and analysis, puts an easy-to-understand spin on how Hamilton County schools are really performing.
From Nieman Journalism Lab:
That easy-to-understand aspect is key: Often, challenges in the education system — or, for that matter, problems in any huge, complex bureaucracy — can be amplified by their intimidation factor alone: When we can’t wrap our head around the problems in the first place, how can we hope to try to solve them? Complexity fatigue can be one of the biggest, broadest impediments to finding solutions to common problems. The charts Chattarati is building, like its dataviz counterparts at The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere, offers a micro solution to the macro problem: They try to take the “data” out of “dataset,” making sense out of the information they contain. And making that information, overall, less cognitively intimidating.
Most everyone involved with Chattarati is a big fan of Nieman Journalism Lab, and getting featured on the blog definitely put a spring in our collective step. In case you missed it, here’s the first story in the education series. The latest installment dropped today.
