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The Bits Are Rotting in the State of Data Journalism

Robert Kosara / July 13, 2016

The Bits Are Rotting in the State of Data Journalism

News articles are an incredibly important source of historical information. Online media and interactive pieces are much more at risk of breaking or disappearing, at least in theory. Well, it’s not just theory. A quick look around shows a number of even fairly recent pieces in major publications that are broken today.

The screenshot above is from this 2013 piece about the “Obamacare” healthcare exchanges. This is what it should look like:

healthcare-exchanges

The same has happened to a number of other pieces at the Washington Post, like this piece about helicopter crashes (CSS broken, Flash app can’t load its data), Homicides in the District (CSS broken, but still functional if hard to use), and How long will we live, and how well (broken CSS makes tooltip unusable, country selection no longer works).

And it’s not just the Washington Post. It seems that the bit rot has befallen many of the New York Times’ Flash pieces as well. Where once there was the fantastic Jobless Rate for People Like You, you’re now just staring at a big hole.

jobless-rate-broken

The same is true for another one of my favorites, Amanda Cox’s amazing Turning A Corner? I did not check more because I could not deal with the sadness of seeing all these beautiful pieces disappearing from the web.

If the Washington Post and the New York Times can’t keep their interactive pieces alive, who can? How are people going to be able to experience them in three years, five years, twenty years, one hundred years? You only have to glance over the fantastic pieces Scott Klein is unearthing from newspapers 100 and more years old – they’re all still there, well preserved, on paper – to realize what an incredible loss this will eventually be.

Perhaps the WaPo and NY Times can fix these things now. But when will they break again? How long will there be a way to run Flash at all? I can only see Flash pieces on my laptop now (not on my iPad or iPhone), and only in Chrome (it just causes too many issues in Safari and I have no use for it other than the occasional old news piece). How much longer will Flash even be around? What then?

News are not just relevant in the moment, they become historical record. In the shorter term, they’re also valuable because they represent highly interesting experiments in visualization. I don’t care about the unemployment rate seven years ago, but I do think that The Jobless Rate for People Like You is a reference for how to present data and make people understand something about statistics. Losing these is very painful.

Filed Under: Blog 2016

Robert Kosara is Senior Research Scientist at Tableau Software, and formerly Associate Professor of Computer Science. His research focus is the communication of data using visualization. In addition to blogging, Robert also runs and tweets. Read More…

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Bella Gotie says

    July 13, 2016 at 11:32 pm

    You are so right and it is so sad!

    Reply
  2. Will Stahl-Timmins says

    July 14, 2016 at 5:54 am

    As interactive data graphics designer for The BMJ (formerly The British Medical Journal), this is something that plagues me all the time. It’s a particularly acute problem for scientific journals, as the things we publish become part of the scientific record, and losing them is perhaps even more painful. I don’t have any good answers to the problem, but you are right on the money with this.

    I’m guessing that the future for historians that have had to find things with microfiche readers and suchlike will be to keep a vast selection of old computers / browsers / versions of javascript running, to be able to decipher old code.

    Reply
  3. Alper Sarikaya says

    July 14, 2016 at 8:08 am

    I wonder how prudent it would be to make everything static after a set amount of time as shared resources start evolving. Perhaps after a period of six months and strong traffic dies down to a particular visualization, all linked content (css, javascript, data, etc.) are archived alongside the visualization. Maybe wedge this process into the retention policy workflow?

    This is not to ignore that linkrot is a real issue. Try looking up any Wired article online older than 2012, their styles are completely borked.

    Reply
  4. Alex Cookson (@alexcookson) says

    July 14, 2016 at 10:16 am

    It’s certainly an interesting issue. My partner is a librarian, so she deals a lot with cataloguing and archiving, and she runs across “bit rot” constantly. It’s frustrating for her day-to-day, but also quite sad, knowing that so much information is so ephemeral these days.

    Reply
  5. Edward says

    July 21, 2016 at 11:12 am

    Thanks, Robert, for bringing this critial issue up. It’s something I’ve been working on for the past several years as digital curator of journalism here at the University of Missouri (we take journalism pretty seriously here). For those interested in making a difference please visit the Journalism Digital News Archive (JDNA) site at http://www.rjionline.org/jdna and sign up for our newsletter. We are also hosting a national forum on preserving online news at UCLA from October 13-14, 2016. Sign up here: https://www.rjionline.org/events/dodging-the-memory-hole-2016-saving-online-news.

    Reply

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