Jazeera where every. Day. The is. The the. My name is mona tell it be and im a date a journalist my job is to find numbers in all sorts of different places and then turn them into images that people will understand and connect to. I always try to think of ways to connect the subject matter with the visualisation itself so that people can automatically see what the data visualisation is all about. If its about me copies being finds in france outdrawn a copy and if its about the k. K. K. I will draw a k. K. K. Hood it is about sleep odors sleepy face is about the Greek Economy taking a dive then im going to draw a diver i hope that by creating handle illustrations it doesnt alienate people it doesnt make people feel like im not smart enough to understand this which is a big problem with i would say traditional dates jonathan. When i create an illustration i dont just assume that because i understand other people understand and i share that illustration with people who dont work in my field. Sometimes and also when i get there and that really really. How i work and very often their responses make sense to me and then i have to go back to square one. I think one of the things that has in. My work is that. Its because the language in the way that it was written. And i think thats one of the things that interests me about number. Of people. I think. And i think part of the success of far right news outlets is speaking a different language even if its a language of misinformation even if its a language that is not grounded in fact. Which. Speaks to people in their own language and thats incredibly effective. Ive been crying in the street. Ive been doing this now for 5 years. 5 years. I kind of know how to do the 101 stuff now when i know how to scan stuff and i know how to color it i have no idea how to paint and something i thought i would give it a try its just quite. A big 1st try. This study came out Early Release year about representation in our boat and it kind of quantified the lack of diversity in a really really spectacular way so they looked at the Museum Collections of 18 major u. S. Museums and they found that 75 percent of all of them in those Museum Collections was made by white and so in the foreground at this point in the room 100. 00 figures and 75. 00 of them white men so in the back room there are 189. 00 additional figures and there are women and people of color that need to be added to the art scene for it actually represent the population as a whole. The title of the what is called who you hate to see. Him and your question is really relevant. I worry that without evidence and data sometimes theres too much of an emphasis on the individual right so one person one thing and then one person saying Something Else and i think one of the powerful things about dates was the end lousy to focus on the issue rather than the individual and that can potentially be quite empowering. In addition to this painting which uses us states i really wanted to do something about u. K. Our space is so there are 3416 artists in the tates Permanent Collection as of the last time that they publish their data and over the u. 3416521 a women and so my 1st date after after analyzing all of that was to create this which is kind of simple and on the horizontal axis is the year that the artist was born and then the y. Axis a percentage of all of those artists that were men or women and what you see over time is that there is some progress so if we had equality right they would just be a horizontal line through this and you would just see 50 percent men and 50 percent women at any given year. And the idea of doing the trick playing thing is it shows that men are kind of encroaching on womens space or like womens territory. Yeah so im going to try and do it for a painting. I get my its a different place is the kind of fall into 2 broad categories really one is responding to things happening in the news so being part of an existing conversation thats already happening. Lived experience can often affect which stories from the news i perceive as being taking on so its been to palestine has been so its well and i felt like what i saw they didnt necessarily was and they certainly were selected in the News Coverage so i was reading and i feel like its a topic that could potentially lend itself well to good day to journalism and so thats something that i might take on that is again informed by my own personal experiences. I think we should have injuries i think we should have done and. The other one is kind of starting a new conversation so i asked people to send me ideas that they have about things that really matter to them so im often checking my d. M. My email and just looking at the things that people care about and verify it comes from there were impressed no experience with it so be like a schoolteacher from one part of america where the Public School system is being defunded that im not aware of and those are questions that might on a surly comes to me because theyre not part of my lived experience but i think that they really important questions. Its i misspoke 5 years ago and im still just a mother that promised im woman in that country in terms of my paperwork and it was just a really really scary time and i dont think its any scary time. There is a great thing and islamophobia in america right now and one of the narratives about that is that muslims pose security threats to the country distances 6 data suggests differently date suggest actually white terrorism is the biggest threat to america at the moment that guns are so you start to American Public safety and so i often think about the areas of misinformation that people have and some of when but attempts to directly address that. I think its often the most probable groups and society that are affected by fake news whether its muslims in america are refugees are being portrayed as like benefit cheats and wanting to come here just to steal money get really really finds me but really frightens me. The. Night oh yeah. So lets see the oldest oldest or the. Its just a lot. You wish way basically the power to do things is that because i was this is when i 1st started working i was just illustrating them and photographing them and posting them as it is but my later work like this is about this was for thanksgiving it was about the number of babies are born relative to the number of hurricanes but like as an illustration it doesnt on the moon it doesnt really make sense as a chart and so i think thats one of the evolutions that people see of like charts that make sense and then charts that eventually dont you know i mean like i want to figure out the spacing of it a little bit yeah we should try and yes and then it starts flashing. Part of the purpose of creating a 100 illustrations is i want people to look at and question the illustration they see in front of them because the truth is that there is a high degree of imprecision in in data right there is something to be said for that and understand that for every statistic least see the truth lies somewhere within the parameters around that number 2 is funny i think even this one right here which did really really well this is one of the like more successful ones i think this one i got the number slightly wrong so its photo shopped in the final version so like the bars a little bit so i dont know if that affects the value of it is actually just like brought those youre processing that you like double checking numbers over here. And honestly getting it wrong the time i feel like its important to be transparent about that. Yeah i think so. Oh my god this so much to do one of the best things about doing the dates journalism i do is that i will publish a chart or deaths from aids and i will show george bush kind of presiding over this period and in all of the comments will be people that will be talking about all the factors that contributed to the rise of aids beyond the government kind of turning a blind eye to it and so reaches a consummate holding me accountable and saying these are the things that youre going right and these are things that youre getting wrong and the smaller your readership the fewer people are able to hold you to account i want to reach a really big group of people partly because i want to get it right and they dont have humans so really get it right with more in an echo chamber and speaking to him in. I think pushed back a little bit of the idea that frankness is something new theres always been this information theres always been deliberate misinformation i think the word fake news implies intention and i think there are a lot of journalists who are trying to do a good job who are contributing to that look at the coverage of the u. S. Election and the response was we didnt get it wrong the public misunderstood. And i think the part the reason why there is so much misunderstanding about that is because journalists on thank you theres an 80 percent chance this person when they are sanctioned this 84. 9 percent chance and that is complete misinformation they are selling you a lie about the precision of their work we dont know the weather to that degree of accuracy we dont know Election Outcomes to that degree of accuracy so the public didnt understand you filed and you need to hold up your hands and say we got it wrong and there was just an unwillingness to do that that was really frightening to me when i was hired by the guardian we had a conversation are we going to cover the u. S. Election by making a prediction and i thought very very very strongly that the role of Data Journalism is not to forecast peoples behavior is to understand the now is to use the past and the present to be able to inform people so that they can make informed decisions themselves about how they want to vote its not to tell them this is what you would do before you do it and said we spent the entire election right now column skeptical polling where we would talk about why polling and its limitations and why it was sort of mean correct and im proud of the fact that we did. I think people can often conflate polling with Data Journalism. It actually comes to be such an intense part of states journalism which which worries me it worries me even when its not about forecasting peoples behaviors because i think polling is fundamentally flawed i think using a 1000 people to represent a population of 320000000 people isnt a good idea its just fundamentally imprecise. I think even if youre not necessarily even an interest in the east like dates or affects every part of your life right you dont have access to good dates how are you able to greater importance say this is why should be paid and so informing people how they can go out and collect the numbers themselves are relevant to their lives or they can be their own advocates is really really important and i think that that perspective is massively influenced by my background in engineering where other people were campaigning for book iraqi refugees and i. D. P. s me to it and actually those iraqi refugees and internally displaced people should have been in the room speak for themselves rather than i speak never. Selling International Security the goal is to go and see enjoying the United Nations i worked means National Organization migrations iraq office and i was looking at statistics about what people in the country needed but later when i went to last time with you was it was not the place that i left the toll it was completely different not always safe there then but they will learn. A bit better theres not much they wanted but we took one car journey where we going to the car from him way with staying in then we went to have some kind of meeting or something and then by the turn. Of the same building and the building had been completely bombed. You know youve been bombed 10 minutes off of the with here all of the headlines about all of the migrants crossing by the water and then we told me that one of our. Yes he nearly lost his life i think it was horrific where he went to throw you on this is why ok. So i went to iraq and i think i took the photographs on my 1st ever visit to the country id never been before and it was my moms 1st time of returning to the country since she left in her twentys and so it was just very very bizarre to see this place that like was always. An imagined place was imagined it was just kind of present in our household but not present in our household and yeah i guess taking photographs was a really important way of making it feel real because it was quite surreal to be there and then what i did which i did recently altered the photographs to show statistics about the country. So one of the issues with traditional dates journalism charts is that you dont see any humanity in it you dont see any people it just feels so. Cold and so one of them takes visualizations i did based on iraq was showing how Life Expectancy has changed over time and literally took a photograph of my mom standing in the garden of the house that she grew up in and digitally altered its just a high as Life Expectancy in iraq has changed because i didnt want someone to see a bar thats bigger and then see a pilot smaller and think ok so iraqis live a few years less i want them to see a woman and know that a shorter Life Expectancy means a few years of her living with her family and means. It means few years of her being able to support her family is a real person. And i still think that using photography and say to journalism could be a really powerful way to do it i really really hate that process looking back at the photographs and i think theyre really terrible but you know its my 1st step in creating this kind of a thing. That is a great tigar i would be proud of that tiger today yeah im going to take a vote thats how tiger should be drawn as an inspiration. 63 johnson mine. 60. 3 christmas. 29. Next extinction. Once youre ready to start if you can type in this you are out. Sign this this is a really really simple spreadsheet in some ways and less important ways is about the titanic its like from the passenger list of everyone that was on the titanic and very often when im like especially ones i create by large institutions the columns at the top seem to make no sense theyre just like a weird series of letters and numbers and thats because somewhere else on the internet is a code that you have to use to kind of decipher some of these things so its really important if you try to find a code book that can help you to decipher what those numbers may necessarily just give up. So i think a lot of people feel healthy skepticism when it comes to numbers that. They dont necessarily feel empowered on stand how to take apart that number they just think ok i have to trust it or not trust and theres my kind of middle path and i think thats a really really bad way to work so i not only want people to understand how i reach my conclusions i also want them to feel empowered to repeat those steps for other pieces of information so if i showing them how i can fact check a kind of politician has made a name when they hear another claim are able to repeat those steps and check out for themselves and obviously like one of the things thats so exciting about data is that you are able to be really transparent in ways that you might not be for other types of journalism so Investigative Journalism sometimes you just. Obviously always always are going to sources of data. So now straightaway were starting to see a story the probability of surviving is much higher in 1st class compared to that class compared to. The now. Just its just a thing yeah yeah ok great state doing getting its good its good to experiment you know i mean about the like and some things that its like i mean accusing me and. You think. A lot of. Anyway but its quite easy to like go in and change i think i like that thats really cool i thought id just talk you through a few different like chant techniques this is small multiples i love Small Schools and i feel like its something that you guys can think about so this was something about cases of measles and again look each each one of these babies is a year i could have just as easily had a pipe shop i saw i want to show a baby that is more fun to be discovered in sports but also allows you to kind of like i dont ice is this idea of kind of firing the subjects with the thing. d its interesting to me as well how when split younger i think they have quite a Good Relationship with math because they are able to understand how they reached the final number right part of the way that people suddenly become disenchanted with math is that it doesnt make sense anymore youre not able to follow those steps and with good Data Journalism its literally a case of saying this is the number of crimes that were committed this is the population and this is how i calculated the break and people can repeat those steps for themselves and see exactly how you reach a conclusion and thats really empowering the shows reader is that youre on the same level Playing Field but if i can do it you can do it too which is a really great message to have in journalism. In the right place. I am sure the field skeptical about most of the data sets i see because in every single case im not in that 8 sec. Arabs are not on any data sets by and large the connected in in america so i have always perceived myself of the other and i dont see myself in the states and even in this times i spend 4 months creating arabs are the other and i think that informs your whole outlook on the world when view are in that dataset and it makes me fundamentally steps call any makes me fundamentally concerned about collecting more accurate and better information about the world around us. I just want to take action coming back to the senate race a man when asked thank you for watching trackers and thats just right im here our nations history thats on actually now that i know im. I think really ever describe myself as a conscious and henry insisted on doing things only the 1st of these illustrations i saw how big this works and what is this isnt even one of them i think it will come through using that word which is in support of this ninetys thing to get which is who gets to kind of put themselves on to him and start our space yes i drink because of the really miserable joke i hate it when i felt like i was really respected and i mean she just started during the week just to kind of stay sane and nice and sanity and you know tracy. When youre struggling to find what the truth is its really helpful to have somebody like mine as well because just based in like spreadsheets and day just tell you that she has cable and theres a way to isnt that much power and i think shes winning savvy a community with people they choose that generally get left out today just. The fact that mona just fills in something thats just rocks or a. Good look you know in a well where which is bizarrely devaluing the truth. And the fact that its beginning to become the norm which is you know terrifying. And that trump but now its weird speak and it feels that trump is winning. So for people to come along and just say look heres the facts heres the truth. This isnt spun its just it is what it is its just so important. Dates are very often replicates the systems of power that already exist maybe they ignore them. Actual people maybe they ignore tiny religious and ethnic minorities and i think a big part of the future of states journalism a big part of the future of Fact Checking is journalists going out and creating their own data sets and thats incredibly difficult to do its incredibly expensive right now but that again might be changing but i think it offers are some really exciting opportunities to break apart from those systems of power and to collect data in a way that better represents different communities. Kenyan journalists in pursuit of press freedom and justice i have school i think its Great Security sure so i asked someone something about that hope you can afford paying clients investigating government corruption and the National Health care system some of their transactions espionage and decon the. Money that is unexplained to Africa Uncensored and publishable seems that people dont want to many of the doesnt need to be asking whos truth is it anyway on aljazeera. It is impossible to overstate the mental scarring of the survivors which peter lived in the home until the age of 4 when the nuns sold him all to yvonne and family by that time hed lost his sister she like nearly 800 others was the name recorded in a death row just a quarter Catholic Organization put parties in here there were baptized yet to put them into on conservation grounds savages for them become painters and the government is so frightened of the damage to the church that the full excavation would do that it is resisting its so theyre threatening court action i think the only way in which this will result is strew an order of the spirit courts of this country i cant see any other way because there is no will theres no wish there is no appetite church and state in this country are still wedded in a poisonous pact in china cancer drugs can be pretty beautifully expensive some desperate patients travel to india to buy cheap generic versions but what cost when aced bolos those smuggling to survive on out 0. It was inappropriate it was improper. A white house official testifies it was wrong for donald trump to press ukraine to investigate a political rival. In this is al jazeera live from also coming up the drinking number of protesters still inside a Hong Kong University weigh up their options as Police Lights outside. The u. K. Prime minister and his main challenge of trade blows up a brags that in the 1st one on one t. V. Election. Hes president of mit security