Victòria Oliveres, elDiario.es, will speak about how her team is using Datawrapper

We’re excited to announce that Victòria Oliveres, data journalist at the Spanish online newssite elDiario.es, will speak at our Unwrapped conference about “How we use Datawrapper at elDiario.es: from drafting to creating a customized style.”

Time to ask her some questions:

Victòria, what will you talk about?

At elDiario.es, we use Datawrapper mainly for two tasks: quickly drafting our ideas and results and reacting fast to news. I’ll show how, by connecting and automatizing our data wrangling and analysis processes from R to Datawrapper, and considering some in-house style rules, we can solve all our newsroom colleagues’ requests in no time – and even have time for our own data team projects.

What’s your experience with Datawrapper?

Datawrapper was one of the first tools I used when I entered the world of data journalism and visualizations almost seven years ago. Especially in the last four years since I was hired in the elDiario.es data team, Datawrapper has been a time saver. We use it every day. The more than 11,000 charts our team has created with this tool prove it!

What's your favorite Datawrapper feature?

Tables are one of my favorites. They allow you to display large amounts of data in an organized and visual way. We’ve used them for very different purposes: from creating rankings (example), to displaying images along with text and numbers (example), to using all their potential when making them searchable. As in this case, when Raúl Sánchez, editor of the elDiario.es data team, revealed for the first time the rate of C-sections in each Spanish hospital:

We also like the heatmap option in tables. We used it to show the results of an experiment: Where do the people who earn the most and the least perceive themselves in comparison to the rest of the Spanish salaries?

What's your guiding principle when working on data visualizations?

Embrace simplicity - but don't ditch complex visualizations! Sometimes people think that designing line or bar charts is for novice professionals. The truth is that communicating complex information through a simple visualization is harder and more effective than it seems. However, this doesn't mean that we have to avoid more creative or elaborate charts just because they seem difficult to understand for the general public. We can use many tricks to help readers understand the information and improve their visual literacy in the process.

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We're looking forward to Victòria's talk at Unwrapped! Until then, you can learn more about her on X, LinkedIn, and her eldiario.es author page. To sign up for Unwrapped and hear Victòria and other great speakers, visit our conference website.