ATLO – Hungarian data and visual journalism

2022 Shortlist

ATLO – Hungarian data and visual journalism

Country/area: Hungary

Organisation: ATLO, Átlátszó

Organisation size: Small

Cover letter:

ATLO is a Budapest-based visual journalism project. It was launched by Hungarian investigative journalism center Átlátszó in November 2018. Since then we created more than 60 projects for clients and for own purpose. Our works are often featured in local and international sites, television and radio channels, conferences and listings.

The team currently is a duo of two data journalists and visualisation experts: Attila Bátorfy, who is head of team and creator of the ATLO project, and Krisztián Szabó.

Bátorfy has been working in the field of journalism since 2008, and has been working with data since 2014. He is a master teacher of journalism, media studies and information graphics at the Media Department of Eötvös Loránd University, and research fellow and data advisor at the Central European University’s Center for Media, Data and Society and serve on the editorial board of Médiakutató, a quarterly scientific journal of Media Studies. For his journalistic work he was awarded with the Transparency-Soma Prize for the best investigative reporting, two Quality Journalism Prizes, the János Eörsi Memorial Award for the best economic investigative article and he received the Junior Prima Prize.

Szabó finished his masters degree at the Media Department of Eötvös Loránd University in media studies in 2021 summa cum laude. He is part of Átlátszó since May 2020, with the expertise in data journalism and data visualisation. He is also part of the graphic team ATLO. In 2021, he received the Junior Prima Prize for his journalistic work.

Our work is seperated into two aspects: creating visualisation stories for our own purpose and for clients. in 2021, we created nine bigger projects (3 of which were for clients) and several smaller visualisations, maps, and experimental work. We also work as the data journalism team of investigative journalism center Átlátszó.

We are inspired by the country we live in: Hungary has great potential regarding data visualisation, and it is visible in the large share of projects we created over the years. We are also inspired by a international data journalism community and visualisation experts: some of our work and experiments this year were inspired by material we saw on the internet, mostly on Twitter.

Description of portfolio:

Hungarian Money was a cross-border project supported by IJ4EU, where five investigative newsrooms from Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia uncovered the international spendings of the Hungary-based Gábor Bethlen Fund. ATLO was behind the data analysis and visualisation in the articles,the site creation, and a general help to other contributors. The project was listed in a weeky collection of best data journalism projects by GIJN.

Mosquito Monitor was a client work for the Hungarian Centre for Ecological Research. Their aim is to monitor the presence of invasive mosquito species. They have been collecting data for years, and they needed a website where this data could be presented in an appropriate and interactive way. Site building and visualisations, as well as data automatisation (via Google Sheets) was made by our team. We are still frequently doing maintenance work on the site, adding new charts and expanding the scope of the project.

Alternative Budapest was a collaboration between ATLO and Budapest Brand. The aim of the project was to create an “online issue” mapping the web of cultural places located in Budapest. Data collection was made by the Budapet Brand team, our team was invited to the project to create interactive visualisations from the collected data. In the end, we created most of the site, added more functionality, uploaded articles to the “application” and helped the team during the launch phase of the project.

A year of the pandemic (A járvány egy éve) is a custom-made scrollytelling visualisation, telling the story of the first year of covid in Hungary through the daily published data. The project was listed in a weeky collection of best visualisations by GIJN.

Hungarian Oppositional Pre-elections of 2021: this project was an election-tracking website, that showed live-updated visualisations about the status of the Hungarian Pre-elections. The site also offered viewers additional visualisations and analytical articles about the background and preludes of the event. The site had 300 thousand visits with 170 thousand unique visitors during the two days of the vote count. It was also included in a weekly collection by Datawrapper.

In a summertime project, we compiled the past 125 years of the Olympic Games, with the scope of all Hungarian medalists in the history of the Olympics.

We also created three experimental map-based works about certain aspects of Hungary:

Climate Maps compiled several versions of Hungary, based on weather and human impact.

Half Hour Distance was another experiment, showing in 3d “coral-like” formations how far away one can go by car from the capitals of each county. It was inspired by Craig Taylor’s Coral Cities and was included in Datawrapper’s weekly list.

Hungary’s Elevation Map showcases the elevation levels of Hungary by every 100 meter, with the inspiration from Alasdair Rae’s tweet. It was included in Datawrapper’s weekly list of interesting works.

Here you can find an overview.

Apart from that we wrote more than 100 data-based articles in various topics and created around 700 charts and diagrams to those articles in the data journalism department of Átlátszó.