Championing media freedom by opening data and making it widely available
Journalists in Afghanistan routinely face violence, intimidation, and threats that undermine their ability to produce quality reporting. This seriously limits media freedom in the country, affecting the work of civil society organizations (CSOs) and reducing the efficiency of development efforts in the country. The scale and frequency of the violence can be hard to grasp, but Nai’s MediaWatch team, in partnership with Internews, is collecting and aggregating hundreds of detailed reports through the country. Today’s launch of data.nai.org.af opens all of this data to the public and visualizes it on an interactive map for the first time.
Sediqullah Tawhidi, the Head of Nai’s Media Watch, announces the opening of data on violence against journalists in Kabul, Afghanistan
Sediqullah Tawhidi, the Head of Nai’s Media Watch, announces the opening of data on violence against journalists in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Presenting data in an open way like this enables a broad set of actors, from CSOs to citizen journalists, to easily engage with the data. Prior to this site, Nai’s data sat in spreadsheets and, while distributed to select individuals, was not broadly disseminated. The site makes Nai’s data truly accessible, allowing visitors to quickly visualize aggregate trends over the past ten years and dive into specific years to see details on hundreds of incidents.
Visualization of all violence against journalists in past ten years in Afghanistan is the homepage of data.nai.org.af
Homepage of data.nai.org.af showing an aggregate look at violent incidents against journalists in Afghanistan.
Interacting with the data
All data is geotagged at the province level on the map. The size of the point represents the number of reported incidents. Mousing over any point shows the historical trend for that province. To add context to the incidents, the site allows visitors to view additional maps along with the incidents. These maps include the number of journalists and media organizations operating in a provinces, security incidents in a given province, and a safety index provided by Nai.