How to Discover Data Stories in Leaked Data (Webinar)

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) was notorious for working on the Swiss Leaks, which exposed one of the biggest banks in the world and its corruption. The ICIJ worked with leaked data to accomplish this.

Mar Cabra, the Head of Data & Research Unit at ICIJ, and Rigoberto Carvajal, ICIJ’s Data Expert sat down with Infogram’s Andrew Matsubara to talk about the investigation and the power of data visualizations. Here’s what happened in the webinar:

Receiving and understanding the leak

When leaked data falls into your lap, the first thing you must do is recognize and understand the security level. Who might be affected by this, who would be interested in this data, who doesn’t want you to have this data, etc. These questions you must ask yourself before moving on. After answering these questions, find tools to store this data safely. Rigoberto also discusses different ways to keep this data secure, while traveling.

According to Rigoberto, you must distinguish if it is structured or not. Alongside this, the different types of data can vary as well. It can come in the form of video, audio, images and text. This is called data profiling. You have to understand the data before digging deep and analyzing.

The interactive app

After understanding the data, the ICIJ wanted to present what they found to the public. According to Cabra, the interactive app allows users to see statistical data by country. It also ranked the countries by money and clients. When you click on a country, it will show you the number of clients and other information involving that.

Data visualizing with Infogram

Towards the end of the webinar, Andrew goes step-by-step of how to create a data visualization using leaked data with Infogram. He took the data from the interactive app and used graphs/pictures with Infogram. Check out his final results below:

The ICIJ took all of this leaked data and visualized it with the help of an application. With numbers, graphs, interactivity and pictures, the ICIJ was able to relay information in a creative way. And Andrew showed that with the help of Infogram you can visualize important data like this as well.