Our weekly analysis of the most popular data journalism stories on Twitter features the mapping of Europe’s drought-stricken rivers, NASA’s plans to return to the moon, how the war in Ukraine compares to other modern conflicts, tracking a stolen truck, and examining Chinese censorship of foreign content with edited episodes of The Big Bang Theory.
How Greenpeace’s investigative site, Unearthed, used satellite imagery and database mapping to reveal hundreds of fires on environmentally protected land in the English moors – including dozens that could be illegal.
NASA’S Landsat 9 satellite went into orbit on September 27. After about three months of shakedown and calibration, it will be regularly downloading data to anyone who asks. It can show trends in deforestation (or afforestation or reforestation), forest health, agricultural crops, coastal erosion, drought and flooding, and more.
Wondering how to investigate climate change and where to find the best data? At a recent conference, science reporters from BuzzFeed News, NPR, and ProPublica shared tips on little-known data sources that can make climate change stories both easier to report and understand.
In this edition of The GIJN Toolbox — which surveys the latest tips and tools for investigative journalists — we’ll take a look at the process of analyzing satellite imagery derived from infrared radiation, a technique The New York Times used to cover a West Coast wildfire. We’ll also explore the controversial practice of using facial recognition technology, how to request NASA satellite data, a new document search tool from Google, and more.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from March 12 to 18 finds disturbing news from @NASAEarth about low Arctic sea ice and temperature anomalies in the North Pole, @seeingtheory ‘s redesigned educational website on probability and statistics and top ten ways to clean your data by @Microsoft.
Here are the top data journalism tweets for March 20-26, per our NodeXL mapping: record low Arctic ice (@NASA); Europe’s STEM gender issue (@MSFTnews); satellite imagery search (@ddjournalism); Western Europe terrorism (@TheEconomist); storm #dataviz (@sciam); data resources (@jschwabish); & more.
