Data Journalism – Sources of Protein and their Carbon Footprints

For our final digital learning project we had a choice between a few options. I chose Data Journalism, which required us to research and make an infographic on a topic of our choosing. The topic that I chose was ‘Sources of Protein and their Carbon Footprints’. The overall theme of this final project is making the world a better place, so I wanted to look into various sources of protein (types of meat and fishes, Tofu, plant based meats etc.) and compare their carbon footprints when producing the same amount of food. Producing meat, especially beef, creates a lot of greenhouse gas that is extremely harmful to the environment. It is also not very efficient as it takes more amount of food to feed the animals compared to how much food we get back from them. Most people already know this, but either enjoys the taste of meat too much to give it up, or depend on it for their protein. While I don’t plan on making anyone give up meat completely, I did want to show through this project how harmful producing mass amounts of meat is to our environment. Along with alternatives to meat that are relatively better for the environment while still giving us the protein we need.

My infographic, which you can visit here was made using the website CANVA. CANVA has a lot of free graphics and the graphs that were very easy to implement. That being said, personally I feel it lacked some basic features which made it annoying to use at times. For my sources I mainly searched on Google with searches close to the title of my project instead of on any specific database. This is because I found that most databases don’t have the information I was looking for. After compiling all my information from various sites I transferred my information into charts provided by CANVA. Then finally I added some pictures to make my infographic more pleasing to look at. Through this process I learned how to more efficiently compile information and how to present it in a way that makes people want to read it.

Nowadays people generally have a pretty short attention span. So paying attention to the small details is very important to get your story heard. Types of pictures, types of graphs and even the placement of all the information all matter in achieving the most eye catching infographic possible, while also conveying what you want to say quickly. Technology has made this process much easier than before. Whenever I wanted to change or move something it was only a click away, and if I didn’t like the changes I could simply undo it. This allowed me to test out different formats to get my message out in the best way possible. I think about the people who do this as a job and how much easier technology has made it for them. Now data journalists can worry more about gathering the correct information rather than spending time making sure people will want to see their infographic in the first place. Technology has made spreading information faster than ever and has made us more conscience of the world around us. It has made the mundane things easier so we can spend more of our time focusing on the important things.

Hopefully going forward we can all be a bit more mindful of the impact producing some foods have on our environment. Small gestures like having even just one vegetarian meal per week can go a long way into lowering our own personal carbon footprints. After all we only have one earth so we should try our best to protect it.

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