First Visual Story

A step-by-step guide to publishing a standalone story from a dataset.

This tutorial will show you how journalists at America’s top news organizations escape rigid content-management systems to publish custom interactive graphics on deadline.

You will get hands-on experience in every stage of the development process, writing JavaScript, HTML and CSS within a Node.js framework. You won’t stop until you’ve deployed a working application on the World Wide Web.

Table of contents

• 1. What you will make
• 2. Prerequisites
• 3. GitHub
• 4. Framework
• 5. Template
• 6. Data
• 7. Cards
• 8. Charts
• 9. Map
• 10. Internet

About

This guide was first prepared by Dana Amihere, Armand Emamdjomeh and Ben Welsh for a training sessions at the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR)’s 2018 conference in Chicago. It was revised in 2022 by Emamdjomeh, Welsh and Vanessa Martinez.