Carbon Brief: Debriefed
We have a voluntary rota at Carbon Brief for everyone to take turns writing our weekly DeBriefed email. I've avoided being on this because I never seem to have enough time to do everything I need to do anyway and taking a day and a bit out of my schedule to write an email didn't seem like a good use of my time. But then I decided to get over myself and try something new - there's never going to be enough time and getting outside my comfort zone every so often is a good thing.
With my colleague Daisy's help I managed to put it together after an only moderately stressful couple of days.
Mostly the email is summaries of the weeks climate change related news but there's a couple of sections where we write new content one, called Captured, is about an interesting chart or map, the other called Spotlight is more free form, you can write about something a little tangential to the usual Carbon Brief fare.
Anyway, here they are...
Captured
Aerosols – tiny light‑scattering particles produced mainly by burning fossil fuels – absorb or reflect incoming sunlight and influence the formation and brightness of clouds. In this way they have historically "acted as an invisible brake on global warming". New Carbon Brief analysis by Dr Zeke Hausfather illustrates the extent to which a reduction in aerosol emissions in recent decades, while bringing widespread public health benefits through avoided deaths, reveals the true extent of warming caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases. The chart above shows the estimated cooling effect of aerosols from the start of the industrial era until 2020.
Spotlight: How Carbon Brief turns complex research into visuals
Carbon Brief’s journalists will often write stories based on new scientific research or policy reports.
These documents will usually contain charts or graphics highlighting something interesting about the story. Sometimes, Carbon Brief’s visuals team will choose to recreate these graphics.
There are many reasons why we choose to spend time and effort doing this, but most often it can be boiled down to some combination of the following things.
Maintaining editorial and visual consistency
We want to, where possible, maintain editorial and visual consistency while matching our graphical and editorial style guides.
In doing this, we are trying to ease our audience's reading experience. We hope that, by presenting a chart in a way that is consistent with Carbon Brief’s house style, readers will be able to concentrate on the story or the explanation we are trying to communicate and not the way that a chart might have been put together.
Highlighting relevant information
We want to highlight the part of a chart that is most relevant to the story.
Graphics in research papers, especially if they have been designed for a print context, often strive to illustrate many different points with a single figure.
We tend to use charts to answer a single question or provide evidence for a single point.
Paring charts back to their core “message”, removing extraneous elements and framing the chart with a clear editorial title helps with this, as the example below shows.
This before (above) and after (below) comparison shows how adding a title, removing extraneous detail and refining the colour palette can make a chart easier to parse.
Ensuring audience understanding
We want to ensure our audience understands the “message” of the chart.
Graphics published in specialist publications, such as scientific journals, might have different expectations regarding a reader's familiarity with the subject matter and the time they might be expected to spend reading an article.
If we can redraw a chart so that it meets the expectations of a more general audience, we will.
Supporting multiple contexts
We want our graphics to make sense in different contexts.
While we publish our graphics primarily in articles on our website, the nature of the internet means that we cannot guarantee that this is how people will encounter them.
Charts are often shared on social media or copy-pasted into presentations. We want to support these practices by including as much context relevant to understanding within the chart image as possible.
Below illustrates how adding a title and key information can make a chart easier to understand without supporting information.
This before (left) and after (right) comparison shows how including key information within the body of the graphic can help it to function outside the context of its original research paper.
When we do not recreate charts
When will we not redraw a chart? Most of the time! We are a small team and recreating data graphics requires time, effort, accessible data and often specialist software.
But, despite these constraints, when the conditions are right, the process of redrawing maps and charts allows us to communicate more clearly with our readers, transforming complex research into accessible visual stories.