6 months ago
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I vividly callback the archetypal election-related information investigation task I worked on, for The Hindu’s print edition. In mid-March 2017, my workfellow Srinivasan Ramani and I produced a double-page dispersed featuring maps, charts, and information investigation of elections successful 5 States. We some knew what needed to beryllium done, but the tools astatine our disposal were limited.
The archetypal situation was to scrape the Election Commission of India (ECI)’s website arsenic results streamed in. This was a gangly bid fixed our primitive coding skills — mine, successful fact, were non-existent astatine the time. Each State’s information took ages to scrape; similar h2o droplets, information from each constituency would trickle down to our excel sheets.
In a people newsroom, specified slow, unpredictable tasks are risky. Yet, fixed that this information formed the bedrock of our exercise, getting it close was important. The hostility was compounded by the information that the ECI’s counting often stretched past 8 p.m. This meant that we had to support scraping and adjacent revise the leafage earlier the deadline. During the 2023 Karnataka Assembly polls, the play implicit the Jayanagar constituency caused our different creaseless sum to spell beyond 1 a.m.
Mapping proved to beryllium a immense task. Older information enthusiasts whitethorn callback Google Fusion Tables. We relied connected these to hole State constituency boundaries successful the KML format, utilized to show geographic data. We past turned to Indiemapper.io, different archaic tool, to colour-code the maps and export them to the designers, who would refine them for print. This process had to beryllium replicated for black-and-white pages, arsenic immoderate people editions were successful monochrome.
2025 Bihar Assembly predetermination results
Charting was different Herculean task. As information streamed in, I callback the manual grind of copy-pasting figures into excel sheets and generating pivot tables to bash calculations. By 11.15 p.m., aft 12 hours of work, I would inactive beryllium feeding the charts to the decorator portion my workfellow would beryllium penning the analysis. The quality table would beryllium breathing down our neck, having already sent each different leafage for printing. Without a moment’s respite, we would person to revise the full dispersed with the updated information for the adjacent edition, and wrapper up astatine 1 a.m.
By the extremity of 2017, we transitioned to Tableau for mapping, which importantly reduced the drama. Thanks to Stack Exchange and galore generous coders, our scripts were delivering results faster than accustomed too. By 2019, we moved to automating investigation successful Google Sheets, relying connected pre-built formulae and scripts to make last tables. This ratio gave america much clip america to constitute for the website successful parallel — a boon for information journalists who seizure the minute-by-minute churn.
Looking back, if the 2017-2019 polls felt similar the Stone Age, the 2019-2024 play seemed similar the Industrial Revolution. We had replaced crude manus tools with dense machinery, but the gears inactive required changeless oiling. Now, we person entered the property of AI. The 2025 Bihar Assembly polls was a watershed moment. It was our archetypal sum executed wholly done AI-generated code, with each table, visualisation, and strand of investigation driven by scripts written by the machine. Google AI Studio generated the codification and JupyterLab executed it, truthful we bid farewell to mapping software, pivot tables, analyzable excel formulae and stand-alone visualisation tools.
AI automation empowered america to record accelerated investigation online connected a big of subjects, anchor a half-hour YouTube unrecorded stream, and besides wrapper up the people variation by 10.30 p.m. Despite these seismic shifts, astir journalists crossed the desk, design, and information teams, who anchored the 2017 coverage, stay astatine the helm. Technology, adjacent AI, cannot regenerate humans. For those who accommodate to it, it simply makes the telling of the communicative easier.
