Preserving Data Journalism: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

News organisations have longstanding practices for archiving and preserving their content. The emerging practice of data journalism has led to the creation of complex new outputs, including dynamic data visualisations that rely on distributed digital infrastructures. Traditional news archiving does not yet have systems in place for preserving these outputs, which means that we risk losing this crucial part of reporting and news history. Following a systematic approach to studying the literature in this area, this paper provides a set of recommendations to address lacunae in the literature. This paper contributes to the field by (1) providing a systematic study of the literature in the fields, (2) providing a set of recommendations for the adoption of long-term preservation of dynamic data visualisations as part of the news publication workflow, and (3) identifying concrete actions that data journalists can take immediately to ensure that these visualisations are not lost.