GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Number Jungles, Gender Gaps, Uber Maps, Brexit Woes

What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from November 5 to November 11 finds employment problems in the UK from @FinancialTimes, Polish data counter-narratives with @gazeta_wyborcza, cool geospatial analysis toys from @Uber, plus the launches of new data labs with @AlterEco_, data articles with @fstalph and @eborgesrey and data newsletters with @voydorg_en.

Mind the (Gender) Gap

The UK’s Office for National Statistics (@ONS) published an article, along with the dataset, exploring the commuting patterns of men and women across the country. It turns out that men account for 65 percent of commutes that last longer than an hour. The clean and clear charts from @LauraFHarding and @philleake91 were a hit with data lovers.

Polish Counter-Narratives

A Polish watchdog website called out the ruling party @pisorgpl for presenting a distorted narrative of its support in local elections with a #dataviz graph (below). To demonstrate a different perspective, @gazeta_wyborcza‘s Sonar platform built a map of opposition coalitions and individual blocks. Check it out here (in Polish).

Accessibility Viz

People with disabilities should have access to public places and services, according to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which the Dutch government ratified in 2016. Journalists at @oneworldnl put the country’s commitment to accessibility to the test by investigating the Dutch restaurant industry, then used cool graphs to illustrate their findings. (In Dutch.)

Uber’s Geospatial Analysis Tool

Twitter was aflutter this week about Kepler.gl, an internal @Uber ‏#dataviz business tool that is now open source. A #GeoCom18 workshop in London about the geospatial analysis tool for large-scale data sets left many data journalists impressed. Thanks to @undertheraedar, you can find sample files from the workshop here.

The Want Ads

With record-low unemployment, and #Brexit looming on the horizon, entire industries in the UK are struggling to fill job vacancies. The @FinancialTimes graphed the sectors facing the biggest labor shortages amid low unemployment, showing that that the industries most affected are hospitality, IT, construction and healthcare.

US Elections: Still Counting

US midterm elections may have ended last week, but votes are still being scrutinized and counted — and, in Florida, recounted. For better analyses, @MITelectionlab has shared election returns datasets in various programming languages on its @GitHub page, along with scraping tools and historical data.

Future of Data Journalism

The adoption of data journalism beyond large newsrooms remains low, despite optimistic predictions. Researcher @fstalph and @eborgesrey, director of the Life in Data research network, looked at data journalism sustainability and the future of data-driven reporting in a recent article, featuring interviews with @emilybell @paulbradshaw @smfrogers @pilhofer @albertocairo @davidherzog @mirkolorenz @Hackette7 @HelenaBengtsson @nicolaskb, and other #ddj pros.

https://twitter.com/fexi/status/1060084439118766081

Raising a Hand on Special Ed

Education company@Study_INTNL crunched official UK data to reveal a significant drop this year in schools with specialized support for student with special needs — this following a steady increase over the previous three years. Visualized with Flourish, the data also showed that the decline in state-funded facilities did not correspond to a significant decline in special-needs students.

Turkey: Keeping Up with Data News

Istanbul-based Data Literacy Association (@voydorg_en) has launched a weekly data journalism newsletter, and this got data geeks in Turkey pretty excited. The bulletin will include expert tips and interviews, plus the latest conversations in the industry. More here (in Turkish).

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

Kira Zalan is a location-independent freelance journalist, whose work has been published by PRI, Christian Science Monitor, US News & World Report, Atlas Obscura, GIJN and others. She has reported on politics, policy, security, and money laundering — as well as fun topics such as food, travel and culture.