GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Mapping Wildfires, Insuring Climate Risk, Data Viz for Kids

What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from December 3 to 9 finds @BuzzFeedNews mapping wildfire prone areas across America, @dwnews dissecting the value of insurance against climate change, the release of @infobeautyaward winners, and @jschwabish teaching fourth grade kids the wonders of data visualization in fun and inventive ways.

Two Decades of Wildfires

Buzzfeed News mapped US government wildfire data from 2000, revealing areas with the highest risk. Americans can input their address and see how close the nearest fire approached, when that was and the number of acres burned.

Insurance Against Climate Change

Climate risk insurance? The world’s poorest countries are being encouraged to take out insurance against climate-related disasters, but is it worth it? DW dives into how such a scheme works, digs into the data and analyzes its effectiveness.

DataViz for Kids

Economist Jonathan Schwabish taught his youngest group yet — his fourth-grade son’s elementary school class. He tried to teach them about data visualizations and entertain them at the same time. Statistician Nathan Yau liked Schwabish’s description of the experience so much that he blogged about it.

Winners: Information Is Beautiful

The Information is Beautiful Awards 2018 winners have been announced. The winners created inspiring data visualizations that “pushes the boundaries, illuminates the truth, and celebrates beauty.”

Data Journalism Handbook 2 Beta Release

The Data Journalism Handbook 2 (beta version) has been released online with an initial 21 chapters. The book, produced by the European Journalism Centre and Google News Initiative, covers a wide range of topics ranging from documenting land conflicts to data journalism by, about and for marginalized communities.

Open Data Worldwide

OpenDataSoft has a collection of more than 13,700 datasets. You can use the platform to store, manage, visualize, find, use and share any city’s data. And it also has a list of open data websites around the world.

Investigative Dashboard

Heard of the powerful platform Investigative Dashboard but have no idea how to get started? OCCRP’s Friedrich Lindenberg wrote a quick overview on how to use the data platform to background people and search for links between people and companies for your investigation.

Computation+Journalism Symposium 2019

The Computation+Journalism Symposium 2019 will be held on February 1 and 2 at the University of Miami. The two days will feature discussions on automation, information quality, algorithms, tools for reporting and storytelling and more. Keynote speakers will be Brian Hamman, Lisa Gibbs and Yphtach Lelkes.

Wrangling Messy Data

Data will often be messy and peppered with mistakes, typos and other problems. TuvaLab offers free data literacy training on how to wrangle messy data, clean and analyze it. (In English and Arabic).

Prison by the Numbers

The number of prisoners in Turkey’s penal institutions and child convicts increased in 2017. Dokuz8Haber breaks down the numbers according to age, level of education and type of crime committed. (In Turkish.)

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.