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With over 500,000 incidents* yearly, America’s gun violence dramatically outpaces that of peer nations. Lawmakers and researchers have struggled to ascertain the problem’s true scale, however, due in part to the scattering of data across counties, cities, police departments, archives and databases.
The journalists behind The Trace sought to remedy the information gap by forming the only nonprofit, independent newsroom focused solely on gun violence. To achieve their mission — improving public understanding, increasing accountability and identifying solutions that can lead to safer homes and communities for all Americans — they had to compile and share data with fellow reporters and truth-seekers of all kinds. In their words, they wanted to create “the single best resource for gun violence in the U.S.”
For this, they brought in Graphicacy and Civilization to build a centralized tool for providing support, resources and reliable data to newsrooms, researchers and the public. The resulting platform, the , offers an unprecedented degree of research clarity and the most comprehensive publicly accessible data resource on this subject.
Enabling a DIY Approach
The Data Hub grew out of The Trace staffers’ desire for a better way to collate, organize and deliver important facts around gun violence. They strive to help other newsrooms approach the topic with more fact-based reporting that reflects regional and demographic variations in firearm use.
“We are in the midst of a crisis that goes largely unexamined, with a scope that’s much bigger than many people truly understand,” said Samantha Storey, Managing Editor at The Trace. “Salacious headlines, crime shows and podcasts reinforce a false narrative about what is really happening in this country. Our job is to make the truth about gun violence easier to access and harder to ignore. We see this as a vital public service.”
“We wanted the Data Hub to deliver what users needed with just a click or two, and Graphicacy made perfect sense as the partner to bring this vision to life,” said George LeVines, Data Hub Editor at The Trace. “They have a solid history of making very robust datasets highly accessible and user-friendly.”
Graphicacy expanded the project’s discovery phase to determine how the costs and benefits of a custom-built solution compared to those of existing tools. “After some careful analysis, we concluded that we could build what The Trace needed using off-the-shelf solutions Data Wrapper and Redivis,” said Ryan Shackleton, Graphicacy’s Senior Data Visualization Engineer. “At that point, we took on more of an advisory role, working with their team to implement the tools we recommended.”
Graphicacy helped The Trace link Data Wrapper — an industry standard tool for generating dozens of custom charts and displays — to the site’s backend, which would streamline data upload and storage.
The teams then built out the centerpiece of the Data Hub, the Data Library, as a platform combining search and filtering functionality with helpful resources and how-to pages. The Library stores a bevy of hand-curated downloadable datasets on topics like firearm sales, school-adjacent shootings, ghost guns, road-rage shootings and more. Datasets are presented as pre-built visualizations as well that answer questions about the distribution of America’s gun violence.
The Graphicacy design team also developed a concise data visualization style guide that extended the visual language of the organization’s existing WordPress site. “We prioritized design continuity in our work,” said Rebecca Lamm, Senior Data Visualization and UX Designer at Graphicacy. “The design for the Data Library and Dataset pages align with the rest of the website while adding design flourishes to bring more visual interest.”
“What I like best is that it’s a really nice blend of aesthetic design and utilitarian design,” said George.
Bringing Everything Together
After establishing the design system and data visualization solution, the Hub still had to solve for data aggregation. The Trace staffers needed a way to stack their Library with new datasets, regardless of size, source or format. The solution had to allow journalists with little to no coding experience to wrangle complex data structures for the end purpose of visualization.
“These processes often require some level of engineering knowledge,” Ryan. “You have to reformat the new dataset, store it, then perform analyses to answer the questions you’re asking and then generate a useful visualization.”
Rather than reinvent the wheel by building those capabilities from scratch, Graphicacy looked to Redivis, a solution that provides cloud-based data analysis, data sharing and user management capabilities.
“We made sure The Trace could use the technologies they were accustomed to using, but in a modern data engineering environment,” Ryan said. “We built them a pipeline to connect their datasets in Redivis to new visuals on The Data Hub. Going forward, they can add new data at almost any scale, available for anyone to download. They can build any chart they want and embed those charts on their website with the appropriate style guidelines, all with no help from an engineer or designer.”
A Strong Start
The Trace first unveiled their Data Library during the 2024 NICAR conference, and early feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Alongside high-impact collaborations with Verite News and NBC, their Help Desk now fields requests from across the U.S. as other newsrooms recognize the Data Library’s tremendous value and unique offering.
“Collaboration between our teams went better than any project I’ve been on. We delivered early and on budget,” said George. He added, “I attribute a lot of the success to our ‘think slow, act fast’ approach. We and Graphicacy dedicated more time to upfront planning and exploration, and then we implemented things quickly once we saw the way forward. That made the difference in getting us to where we are today.”
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Graphicacy has created data visualizations and infographics for top-tier organizations and companies, domestically and internationally, including the , , the , , the and many.
*National Institute of Justice and the National Crime Victimization Survey
