Charles Berret

Stephen Kasica, Charles Berret, Tamara Munzner

Data journalists routinely integrate records across multiple independently published sources to support accountability reporting, yet no existing interactive wrangling tool treats the collection of tables -- rather than the single table -- as its primary unit of work. We present OpenRoundup, an open-source, browser-based system that enables data journalists to consolidate multiple tables into a single analysis-ready output without writing code. The interface comprises five coordinated panels that implement a schema-first, values-on-demand paradigm with live schema previews, ambient data quality alerts, and a recursive treemap visualization of the evolving operation tree. A client-only architecture powered by DuckDB-WASM runs in the browser, providing strong data privacy guarantees suited to sensitive journalism data. The system introduces two conceptual contributions: eager table consolidation, in which a composite table is assembled early in the wrangling phase via interactive, incremental assembly of multiple source tables; and a declarative vocabulary for table consolidation consisting of two operations, Stack and Pack. We evaluate the system through a replication study in which the authors reproduce 17 published journalist programming workflows using only the interface, and a deployment study with four professional data journalists. The replication study demonstrates expressive coverage of real-world consolidation tasks. The deployment study confirms utility for practitioners who understand joins conceptually but lack the programming skills to execute them, and surfaces an unanticipated secondary value for data journalism education.

Stephen Kasica, Charles Berret, Tamara Munzner

For the many journalists who use data and computation to report the news, data wrangling is an integral part of their work.Despite an abundance of literature on data wrangling in the context of enterprise data analysis, little is known about the specific operations, processes, and pain points journalists encounter while performing this tedious, time-consuming task. To better understand the needs of this user group, we conduct a technical observation study of 50 public repositories of data and analysis code authored by 33 professional journalists at 26 news organizations. We develop two detailed and cross-cutting taxonomies of data wrangling in computational journalism, for actions and for processes. We observe the extensive use of multiple tables, a notable gap in previous wrangling analyses. We develop a concise, actionable framework for general multi-table data wrangling that includes wrangling operations documented in our taxonomy that are without clear parallels in other work. This framework, the first to incorporate tablesas first-class objects, will support future interactive wrangling tools for both computational journalism and general-purpose use. We assess the generative and descriptive power of our framework through discussion of its relationship to our set of taxonomies.