New Datawrapper Features to Cover Elections

David Kokkelink

For the German Federal Election on September 24 we are rolling out several new features, which are helpful for newsrooms everywhere, whether used for election coverage or not. Expect similar offerings in the future, for elections in other countries.

Datawrapper is increasingly used for elections. In the past year, newsrooms used the tool to cover the outcome of the “Brexit” referendum, the elections in France, the Netherlands and the recent election for the United Kingdom. Each election produced a spike in created charts and chart views by an audience going into the millions.

New: Election District maps for Germany

New Maps

We already had a map of constituencies for the UK election as well as for France and the Netherlands. Now, we have added maps for the German electoral districts, both for the entire country as well as per-state.

Discrete Colors

This is a feature asked for by many: Now you can use stepped, discrete colors for your map to highlight absolute values instead of numerical ones. This feature can be used to highlight which county was won by which party, for example.

Live chart updates

You no longer have to re-publish charts when the data is changing rapidly. Instead, there is an option to connect to a data source. Once set-up this results in automatic, instant updates of the data in the charts or maps. How this works: Your external data file needs to be publicly accessible under a URL that supports cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) and HTTPS. The data file will be requested every time the chart loads, so make sure to host it on a server that can deal with high traffic. Please also make sure your CDN’s cache time-to-live (TTL) setting is correct. To use this feature, please get in touch with us through support@datawrapper.de so that we can enable this additional way to upload data for you. This feature is free to use but needs some set-up work on your side. We have a tutorial detailing how to set-up an external data source.

Should you plan to cover the German election (or any other in the future), please get in touch with us. We provide support, ideas and chart examples via support@datawrapper.de

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David Kokkelink

(he/him, @DavidKokkelink) is a co-founder and co-CEO of Datawrapper. Originally a software developer, he works across our customer-facing and product development teams to make sure Datawrapper is headed in the right direction. David lives in Berlin.

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