Interacting with Data to Create Journalistic Stories: A Systematic Review

Abstract

With the increasing amount of data available in digital media, new professional practices emerged in journalism to gather, analyze and compute quantitative data that aims to yield potential pieces of information relevant to news reporting. The constant evolution of the field motivated us to perform a systematic review of the literature on data-driven journalism to investigate the state-of-art of the field, concerning the process, expressed by the “inverted pyramid of data journalism”. We aim to understand what are the techniques and tools that are currently being used to collect, clean, analyze, and visualize data. Also, we want to know what are the data sources that are presently being used in data journalism projects. We searched databases that include publications from both fields of computing and communication, and the results are presented and discussed through data visualizations. We identified the years with the highest number of publications, the publications’ authors and the fields of study. Then, we classified these works according to the changes in quantitative practices in journalism, and to the contributions in different categories. Finally, we address the challenges and potential research topics in the data journalism field. We believe the information gathered can be helpful to researchers, developers, and designers that are interested in data journalism.