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Present at the heart of the Franceinfo platform, the Hub displays raw content and offers live, human and interactive editorial processing directly to the viewer. This has made it possible to introduce a new information format, a guarantee of transparency and objectivity, which is all the more essential in a period of high political activity such as the one we have experienced in recent months.
Power BI, data at the service of information
That is why we wanted to exploit this technology on election nights. The idea: to go even further in the use of the touch screen, always with a logic of interaction. With this in mind, Microsoft refined for us a Hub application specialized in Big Data management, the processing of mass data. This is the Power BI program, which manages a multitude of databases simultaneously to cross-reference information in real time and offer different forms of visualization.
The hub at the heart of the Franceinfo platform:
Direct decryption
The basic idea was to incorporate the election results into the machine as they were provided by the Ministry of the Interior. And to further innovate the editorial approach and better put the collected information into perspective, we compared this dynamic data with existing databases. Various databases were selected, in consultation with our analysts from polling institutes, from the results of previous polls to socio-demographic figures (poverty, unemployment, urbanization...).
As the results came in, we were able to compare them with these societal data to give them meaning and decipher the underlying trends... all live! This allowed us to uncover important information, such as the rise in extreme voting that appeared visually on the maps.
A joint project with Microsoft
This use of Big Data as an editorial contribution was still unheard of in our offerings: only commentators could offer this perspective. This time, it was delivered raw, live, instantly and objectively.
This required significant development work on the application by Microsoft engineers. Initially, the forms of visualization proposed (histograms, pie charts...) were not visual enough to be understandable by the public and even by journalists familiar with the software. It was therefore necessary to create from scratch the best form of visualization for the project: face-to-face maps of France, dressed in significant colors, with the possibility of focusing on specific areas and the ability to interact with the screen ...
Demo: the Hub in action:
Goal achieved
Everything was ready only at the last minute and Microsoft engineers even continued to work live during election nights to ensure that the project ran smoothly. A large human investment therefore, and a significant cost for our partner, which forces us to reserve this technology for the most important events, hoping for a quick simplification for a more regular use.
But the objective has been achieved: to offer original editorial content that provides an instant visual relationship to the information, and therefore enables rapid understanding; to compare mass data with each other to give it meaning in real time, to offer raw information by providing immediate and objective decryption; to humanize data processing and open up analysis to viewers. Beyond the editorial offering, this innovation has proposed a new relationship to our audiences.
