C.J. Sinner, Star Tribune, will speak about making four unique charts with Datawrapper scatterplots

We’re excited to announce that C.J. Sinner from the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Minnesota, will speak at our Unwrapped conference about “Secret Scatterplots: How We Made 4 Unique Datawrapper Charts.” C.J. is the Director of Graphics and Data Visuals at the Star Tribune, and known for leveraging Datawrapper charts to the fullest.

Time to ask her some questions:

C.J., what will you talk about?

They’re not just for regressions and correlations — scatterplots in Datawrapper can be for anything that lives in a coordinate field. We made a timeline, a lollipop chart, a beeswarm chart, and a Taylor Swift Eras Tour surprise song tracker from this one chart type. My session will take a behind-the-scenes look at how each one was built.

What’s your relationship to Datawrapper?

I’ve has been dabbling in data and graphics in news contexts since 2012, but moved fully into a graphics role in 2018, and began managing the team at the Star Tribune in 2021.

I’ve been using Datawrapper specifically since its very early days, around 2013 or so, and feel like I’ve become extra fluent in the tool because I’ve worked with it in every stage of its development as it added features and staff and became the go-to fast charting tool for newsrooms.

Two Datawrapper visualizations created by the Star Tribune Graphics and Data Visuals team. Visit the articles showing the COVID-19 chart, and the tilted 3D locator map with emoji in the labels to indicate change.

Do you have a guiding principle when working on visualizations?

A graphic should do one of two things. It should either pretty immediately convey to the reader the crux of the trend or issue or location at hand, OR be visually compelling enough to entice the reader to spend time with it, explore it, hover over it, engage with it, become more curious about the topic. Bonus points if it does both.

And what's your favorite Datawrapper feature?

Gotta be annotations. The addition of these over the years, with the ability to add bits of HTML and CSS, various styles of pointers, the ability to control what shows up on certain screen sizes, has allowed a level of polish and contextual information to our graphics that before was only achievable with ai2html.

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We're looking forward to C.J.'s talk at Unwrapped! Until then, you can find her on X or LinkedIn, and see more of her work on her Star Tribune page.

To sign up for Unwrapped and hear C.J. and other great speakers, visit our conference website.