GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Muslims to Mecca, Women (Not) in Netflix, Inside Airbnb Europe, London’s Foul Air

What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from Aug 20 to 26 finds @Numerama analyzing the representation of women in @netflix series and finds it lacking, @AJEnglish creating an interactive explainer on how two million Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca every year, @FT readers brainstorming air pollution solutions for London, and @Bastamag digging into the data of @Airbnb — a cash cow for home renters.

Netflix, House of Men

Netflix is ​​today one of the most important players in the world of entertainment, and the company is proud of its diversity. But Numerama analyzed the proportion of women among the actors, directors and writers of 115 original Netflix series and their 1,912 episodes, and found representation of female actors, directors and writers somewhat lacking. (In French.)

Pilgrimage to Mecca

Al Jazeera created an interactive explainer on how two million Muslims from around the world travel to Mecca for Hajj every year.

Airbnb Cash Cow

The arrival of Airbnb in major European cities has pushed up housing and rental prices at the expense of people who live and work locally. France is no exception. Data published by Inside Airbnb shows that in 2016, 55,720 homes and rooms were rented out via the platform. And 20 percent of the owners (more than 9,300 people) had several dwellings on offer. (In French.)

London’s Air Pollution

London is suffering from high levels of nitrogen dioxide air pollution — comparable to Delhi and Beijing — which inflames people’s lungs and is linked to shorter life expectancy. Here are crowdsourced solutions to the city’s foul air.

Cycling Hazards

Tagesspiegel is running an ambitious project to research cycling in Berlin, including its routes and hazards. They issued a call for Berliners to help collect data using proximity sensors to measure distances between cyclists and motorists. (In German.)

https://twitter.com/ThiesLindenthal/status/1032208890128228353

ICIJ Employs Machine Learning

The rise of the machine has freed ICIJ members to pore over millions of documents in a custom-built search engine. Rigoberto Carvajal describes how the consortium streamlined the process of wrangling big data and efficiently filtering it.

Custom-Made Charts

Charticulator, a project from Microsoft Research, is an interactive authoring tool that enables the creation of custom-made and reusable chart layouts, all without requiring any coding. Open source at Github.

Data Journalism Tips

Data journalist Juan José Lyon shares some key ideas and tips to work with files and transform data into stories. From a workshop organized by the Chilean Journalists Network. (In Spanish.)

Subsidizing Transport in Pakistan

Media for Democracy takes a look at the subsidies for a metrobus service in Islamabad, which runs into billions of rupees.

Reading Web Archival Content

This WARC (and ARC) Streaming Library provides a fast, standalone way to read and write WARC Format commonly used in web archives.

Thanks, once again, to Marc Smith of Connected Action for gathering the links and graphing them.

Eunice Au is GIJN’s program coordinator. Previously, she was a Malaysia correspondent for Singapore’s The Straits Times, and a journalist at the New Straits Times. She has also written for The Sun, Malaysian Today and Madam Chair.

For a look at Marc Smith’s mapping on #ddj on Twitter, check out this map.