“Verikaynagi.com” is now Online: “To Break Polarization and Analyze Data”

“Data” has become a word that opens all doors around the world. Data, personal or public, is one of the most valuable assets nowadays. Verikaynagi.com (data source) is an interesting project for anyone that needs data. Their aim is to help raising data-oriented arguments in a polarized country like Turkey.

“Data” has become a word that opens all doors around the world. Data, personal or public, is one of the most valuable assets nowadays. Verikaynagi.com (data source) is an interesting project for anyone that needs data. Their aim is to help raising data-oriented arguments in a polarized country like Turkey.

After the launching of the project, we interviewed Baybars Örsek from Doğruluk Payı (an online fact-checking platform) and asked him about the details.

What is the aim of Verikaynagi.com? What kind of needs does it meet? How will it create a social benefit?

Verikaynagi.com is a platform which can easily be used by data journalists, academicians, activists and simply by any other member of the society. It is a data source which aims to collect and visualize any kind of data related to Turkey, provided by Turkish Statistical Institute and other national/international institutions. Our objective is to help raising data-oriented arguments in our polarized country.

Verikaynagi.com has five main categories. What are those and their contents?

We have these categories to increase user experience. In ‘Calculating Machine’ we examine topics related to economic welfare. We examine topics related to education under ‘Blackboard’ category. We examine science and technology topics under “Laboratory” and under the category called “State Building”, we collect data related to public. Lastly, the category called “Globe” includes data related to culture, art, sports and etc. It is totally free to search the web site. There are visualized data on various topics like local patent applications, museum visitor numbers, rates of unemployment among university graduates, divorcement rates and so on. One of our primary goals is to make data more understandable by the method of visualization and share them with the public.