What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for July 18-24: Trump and more Trump (@chiquiesteban, @washingtonpost); data-driven justice (@Esri); create your own database (@flexiodata); Onodo data viz tool (@civio); wind map (@planetlabs); German commutes (@zeitonline).
When Gustavo Cerati, a legendary Argentinian musician and songwriter, was asked to share his best advice for new musicians, he refused—saying instead that “experiences are not transferable.” You may agree or may not with his statement, but if you’ve ever worn an Oculus Rift or a similar virtual reality (VR) headset, you’ll know we are getting closer and closer to transferable experiences.
In a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the Aleph is a point in space that contains all others. To those who see it, it presents the entire universe at once — an investigative reporter’s dream. Over the past six months, I’ve been working for OCCRP to produce a tool named after this mythical object. It’s based on a prototype I hacked up as part of my 2014 Knight International Journalism Fellowship, and it has now grown into a data research tool as part of the Investigative Dashboard.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for July 7-11: Our World in Data (@MaxCRoser); narrating networks (@JWYG); sentences off the grid (@edwardtufte); FiveThirtyEight’s ddj workflow with R (@FiveThirtyEight); Netzwerk Recherche conference video (@spreerunde); & more.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for June 23-30: Brexit data (@webk1d & @timesredbox); Aleph data search tool (@pudo); spatial data (@enjalot); digital startups & human rights (@dw_akademie); humanizing data and Mexico’s missing women (@gijn).
Mexican newspaper El Universal has put a face to the 4,534 women who have gone missing in Mexico City and the State of Mexico over the last decade: Ausencias Ignoradas (Ignored Absences) aims to put pressure on the government and eradicate this situation.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for June 10-22: Voting habits of Americans (@nytimes); Eurocup players (@br_data); FT dataviz guide (@digiday); stats for journalists (@ddjournalism); #ddj awards recap (@smfrogers); nursing homes in Germany (@source); & more.
With the growing relevance and popularity of data journalism, it may be easy to prioritize numbers over people, and spend our time emphasizing the data through graphics, maps, charts, and other visual products. But sometimes the faces and names behind the data get lost. Fortunately, we have some guiding lights to keep us on the path of good journalism. Consider these highlights from the panel Humanizing Numbers at IRE16…
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for May 31-June 9: EU Swings Right (@NYtimes); #ddj newsrooms (@niemanlab); German commutes (@zeitonline); French police violence (@BuzzFeedFrance); Dataharvest HackDay (#thesponge.eu); Ethnic America (@WashingtonPost); & more.
In an extract from his book Finding Stories with Spreadsheets Paul Bradshaw explains how to use basic cleaning functions in spreadsheets to make it easier to combine data, including a case study where the same functions were used to speed up a research process for a story.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for May 23-30: a racist algorithm (@ProPublica); Spain’s female politicians (@elespanolcom); German anti-refugee violence (@Julian_Moe); US election (@ddjournalism); satellite imagery (@webk1d); and more.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for May 13-24: Best dataviz of the year (@Gizmodo); 85 tools for digital journos (@Journalism2ls); missing women in Mexico (@Univ_Data); how to analyze big leaks (@M_Mandalka); news graphics collection (@marijerr); & more.
With the aim of contributing to the promotion of data-based investigations and asserting its vision of journalism as an essential service to democracy, OjoPúblico has published “La navaja suiza del reportero. Herramientas de investigación en la era de los datos masivos” (“The Swiss Army Knife Journalist: Digital Research Tools in the Era of Big Data”), a resource for Hispanic reporters who want to become familiar with the world of data journalism and, above all, to understand its meaning and relevance in Latin America and the world.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for May 3-12: #ddj awards (@GENinnovate); China’s EU stereotypes (@foreignpolicy); Atlantic slave trade (@slate); French employment (@Data_Match); Germany’s green cities (@morgenpost); bubble maps (@datawrapper); & more.
Only one-tenth of national data is really open and free, according to the third annual Open Data Barometer by the World Wide Web Foundation. “The open data movement is at a turning point,” the report finds. “If we allow this moment to slip away, however, open data could fade into a ghost town of abandoned pilots, outdated data portals, and unused apps.”
The trove of files that make up the Panama Papers is likely the largest dataset of leaked insider information in the history of journalism. For ICIJ’s Data and Research Unit, it offered a unique set of challenges. The overall size of the data (2.6 terabytes, 11.5 million files), the variety of file types (from spreadsheets, emails and PDFs to obscure and old formats no longer in use), and the logistics of making it all securely searchable for more than 370 journalists around the world are just a few of the hurdles faced over the course of the 12 month investigation.
Facebook and Google and their humongous data crunching machines flourish while fine media wilt. How to compete? They take media’s original costly-to-produce-content for free and make it available to users to circulate, anticipating their needs with their intelligent algorithms.
Some of the best tips and techniques come out of the annual meetings by our colleagues in Scandinavia, and this year is no different. More than 600 participants attended the SKUP conference in Tønsberg, Norway, on April 8-10. Among the tip sheets presented was this gem of 25 practical tips that reporters in even the smallest newsrooms can use to good effect, focused on finding great characters and cases to bring your story to life.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for April 26-May 2: Pirated Papers (@sciencemagazine); Panama Papers tech (@ICIJorg); Europe Open Research (@ddjournalism); Water Webinar (@code4africa); 6 Data Story Rules (@DataScienceCtrl); German E-Cars (@BR24); & more.
The story published in the Washington Post’s Wonkblog ended up being about race, but it didn’t start out that way. Nick Diakopoulos, who leads the lab, wrote for the Wonkblog last year with a story on how surge pricing motivates Uber drivers to move to those surging areas, but does not increase the number of drivers on the road as Uber claims.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for April 19-25: Amazon delivery & race (@business); Cartodb.js map (@maartenzam); ICIJ slides (@cabralens); SRF data GITHUB (@SRF); France immigrant dataviz (@data_match); Flint’s water (@nytimes); and more.
People regularly ask what tools to use or what programming language to learn for data-driven journalism (ddj). There is no right answer for it, especially considering that technology and tools available are evolving quickly in the field.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for April 2-11: Behind the Panama Papers Investigation (@ICIJorg, @SZ); Best #ddj on taxes (@OKFN); Spies in the Sky (@BuzzFeed); EU Data Journalism Manifesto (@medium); World scientific collaboration (@storybench); & more.
“Hello,” wrote the anonymous source to a German newspaper, “this is John Doe. Interested in data?” Thus began what would soon become an international financial investigation into what are being called the Panama Papers—an investigation so massive that even whistleblower Edward Snowden, on Twitter, called it the “biggest leak in the history of data journalism.”
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for March 20- April 1: ddj without borders (@Maid_Marianne); time-lapses basics (@vimeo); Berlin bikelanes (@morgenpost); data ebook (@jonathanstray); North Korea missiles (@bbc); death penalty stats (@guardian); and more.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for March 14-21: undercovered stories (@JigsawTeam); NICAR links (@MacDiva); Madrid conference (@JPDatos); podcasts (@carlapedret); GEN Awards (@GENinnovate); R for annotations (@hrbrmstr); German elections (@zeitonline).
Podcast are a great way to find out stories and to be entertained. However, have you ever thought about using them to learn data journalism? In this list, I have collected some of the best podcast about data. Some are specifically about data journalism, whereas others approach data from an innovative perspective.
