For data journalists there is a balancing act between publishing information vital to a story and protecting the person behind that information. Vojtech Sedlak explains the pitfalls and offers tips on how journalists can protect the people that feature in the data without compromising the story.
The advancement of technology and availability of complex data tools has been a real boon to society, but utilizing the wrong tools for the job can have dire consequences. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from October 5 to 11 finds British media organizations the BBC and the Guardian reporting on a blunder by the English national health authority: it used the wrong Excel file format to store data, resulting in the loss of thousands of COVID-19 test data results. Meanwhile, German television news program ZDF heute highlighted how the Arctic has reached record high temperatures this year, DCist and Spotlight DC examined problems in the process of evictions, and we find Information is Beautiful offering a daily feed of uplifting news among the gloom of 2020’s news cycle.
Personal data is big business, and not only for private firms. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from September 21 to 27 finds a number of troubling investigations: Channel 4 News revealed that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign used personal data from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica to deter Black voters from casting their ballot; Consumer Reports found that companies were making it difficult for people to opt out of having their data sold despite a landmark California law that protects individual data rights; and Noteworthy and The Business Post highlighted a concerning lack of clear regulation surrounding access to, and use of, genetic and patient data by private firms.
“Death is the great equalizer,” or so the saying goes. But our NodeXL #ddj mapping from September 21 to 27 finds an investigation by The Boston Globe Spotlight team that proves otherwise: race and income influences how and when people die. In this Top 10 #ddj edition, we also found The Markup launching its new privacy tool, the Financial Times examining how Finland, and the cities of Madrid and New York City handled the pandemic, as well as a great guide by Datawrapper’s Lisa Charlotte Rost to choosing better colors for your charts.
How fast is the coronavirus spreading in countries around the world? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from September 14 to 20 finds data visualization designer Jan Willem Tulp simulating the speed of COVID-19 infections and German television news program ZDF heute mapping how the pandemic traversed the globe. Meanwhile, Thibi Recipes explores tutoring data journalism as if you’re following a cooking recipe, the Financial Times reports on climate extremes, and ICIJ and Buzzfeed bare suspect financial data.
Territorial disputes — over land, borders, or resources — are a long-standing source of tension around the world. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from September 7 to 13 finds Al Jazeera explaining the India-China dispute over a shared Himalayan border in seven maps, and the Financial Times attempting to put into context the tensions between Turkey and its neighbors competing over natural gas discoveries. We also find Stanford University and Big Local News offering data reporting grants on the pandemic, and other groups offering free data journalism workshops and webinars.
What was the magnitude of the Beirut port blast and how did it compare to other infamous explosions in history? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 31 to September 6 finds Reuters illustrating just how powerful last month’s blast was in relation to the Chernobyl disaster and other explosions. The Tampa Bay Times highlighted how a county sheriff’s office is using an algorithm to supposedly predict and intercept the criminals of the future, while The New York Times used satellite maps to show how physical and political geographies interact across the United States. ESPN has been looking into the potential of people in college football crowds to become COVID-19 super-spreaders, and Slate analyzed the overuse of the word “murmur” in the popular Twilight novel series.
The police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old African American man, in the United States has reignited national unrest just months after the death of George Floyd. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 24 to 30 finds ProPublica documenting police violence against Black Lives Matter protesters and tracking police accountability. The New York Times shows how the process of redlining, or denying mortgage finance to predominantly Black neighborhoods from the 1930s onwards, has resulted in heat disparities among cities, and BuzzFeed News uncovers scores of new internment camps in Xinjiang, China, by analyzing satellite data.
Satellite imagery has become increasingly useful in establishing evidence of human rights abuses and in shining a light on dubious activities being conducted in secretive parts of the world. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 17 to 23 finds NBC News utilizing satellite data to solve a long-standing mystery about North Korean “ghost boats” washing up on Japanese shores, The New York Times analyzing footfall data to determine how the coronavirus pandemic has influenced consumer spending, and Bellingcat revealing a coordinated network of attacks on Twitter against the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO).
One of the biggest issues that comes with visualizing election forecasts is how to incorporate uncertainty in a way that is understandable to readers. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 10 to 16 finds FiveThirtyEight explaining their election forecast design process and considerations. Elsewhere, The New York Times Magazine has been digging into the collapse of the fashion industry, and the Hong Kong Free Press is teaming up with the Journalism and Media Studies Centre of The University of Hong Kong to expand its protest research archive.
British data journalism instructor Paul Bradshaw analyzed 100 pieces of data journalism and identified seven common story angles. Here, he uses real-world examples to show how common angles can generate useful story ideas, and the strategies and considerations that reporters should keep in mind.
How many people need to get infected or die of the coronavirus before we reach a herd immunity threshold? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 3 to 9 finds that The Washington Post created a herd immunity calculator to estimate this. Also in the Data Journalism Top 10 this week: BBC’s Visual and Data Journalism team illustrates the future of work environments post-COVID-19, The New York Times shares projections of the potential number of children who may carry the virus back to school in the fall according to county, and Oregon Public Broadcasting discovers a surprising reason for the low incidence of coronavirus transmission in bars and restaurants in the US state of Oregon.
Across the data science community, knowledge graphs have become a growing phenomenon in recent years, driving many applications including virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa. Friedrich Lindenberg, from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, writes about how its data platform Aleph makes use of knowledge graphs to help investigative reporters analyze and cross-reference data.
In the midst of the pandemic, some newsrooms haven’t forgotten about the issue of climate change. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 20 to 26 found ProPublica partnering with The New York Times Magazine to examine climate migration and where climate refugees are moving to. On the COVID-19 front, FiveThirtyEight revealed the disparities in the availability of testing sites between Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and white areas, broadcaster RBB highlighted that the risk of coronavirus was more keenly felt by low-income earners, and the Google News Initiative and Agência Lupa communicated the impact of the coronavirus by visually putting readers at the epicenter of an outbreak.
How widespread is mask use in your country? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 13 to 19 finds The New York Times mapping the odds of people encountering other mask wearers in the United States, two university professors quantifying the number of interruptions a parent suffers on average every hour while working from home, the Committee to Protect Journalists talking to data journalists about the struggles of reporting on COVID-19, and openDemocracy documenting cases of mistreatment of women in labor around the world since the pandemic started.
The coronavirus pandemic has upended the lives of people around the world, but some communities are especially hard hit. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 6 to 12 finds The New York Times analyzing data that reveals Black and Latino people have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, The Washington Post highlighting that business relief funds for the pandemic have gone to the rich and well-connected, and Bloomberg looking at more than 120 US businesses that say the coronavirus helped force them into bankruptcy.
The investigative team behind a story in The Washington Post that focused on two military helicopters that roared over demonstrators in Washington, DC on June 1 shared the exploratory scripts used to analyze and visualize flight data for the aircraft which monitored protesters in the city that day.
It is hard to comprehend the true impact of COVID-19 around the world. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from June 29 to July 5 finds Reuters trying to visualize the alarming rate of deaths related to the coronavirus pandemic, Datawrapper examining which employees can actually afford to work from home, and data journalist Carmen Aguilar García writing about using R programming language and automating repetitive data processes in order to keep up with the demand for pandemic news.
Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from June 22 to 28 finds The New York Times analyzing travel patterns and genetic data to show how the disease spread across the United States, and the impact it has had on nursing homes and elderly care facilities. The Washington Post is responding to the increasing importance of visual data communication by expanding its data and graphics team, and the Pulitzer Center is calling for data journalism story proposals.
In the latest webinar in GIJN’s series on Investigating the Pandemic, a leading data journalism trainer and a Pulitzer Prize winning data scientist shared insights on data sources that can illuminate COVID-19 impacts beyond health.
Once confined to bands of protesters, the Black Lives Matter movement has spread across America. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from June 15 to 21 finds The New York Times mapping the protests in more than 2,000 US cities and towns over a two week period. On the coronavirus front, The Telegraph analyzed the widening racial wealth gap caused by the pandemic, the Guardian and Liberty Investigates looked into police enforcing lockdown measures disproportionately against Blacks, Asians, and other minorities, while Important Stories and Holod Media examined the fines issued by Russian courts for lockdown violations during the pandemic.
In the latest webinar in the GIJN series on Investigating the Pandemic, an investigative reporter, a health data expert, and a world-renowned visualization professor shared insights on what newsrooms should consider when presenting COVID-19 information visually. An online audience of journalists from 46 countries heard that clear explanation and transparency were critical for all graphic formats.
The death of African American George Floyd in police custody has resulted in a major uproar against structural racism in the United States. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from June 1 to 7 finds The New York Times examining police use of force in Minneapolis, the city in which Floyd died after being pinned down by a police officer. The Washington Post also dug into data of every fatal shooting in the US by police officers since 2015.
Which communities are most economically affected by the coronavirus pandemic? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from May 25 to 31 finds the Toronto Star looking at the effects of Canada’s lockdown on different communities in the country, ProPublica sharing a tool that lets you explore United States federal government contracts related to the coronavirus, the Financial Times analyzing excess mortality in 19 countries, and the Knight Center for the Journalism in the Americas offering a free online course on ethics in data journalism.
The devastating consequences of the coronavirus pandemic can get lost in the mass of numbers presented. Journalists are working hard to humanize the data. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from May 18 to 24 finds The New York Times with a moving tribute to lives lost to COVID-19; Schema Design, the Google News Initiative, and Axios visualizing coronavirus-related Google searches; and The Atlantic revealing the US CDC conflated results of two types of coronavirus tests.
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve seen heated debate on whether to best solve the health crisis through “herd immunity” — the indirect protection that occurs when much of a population becomes immune to infection. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from May 11 to 17 finds FiveThirtyEight creating a simulation calculator which shows that getting to herd immunity without a vaccine isn’t quite that simple; The Marshall Project tracking COVID-19 cases and deaths in prisons across America; the BBC’s Media Show highlighting data journalists as the media’s latest rock stars; and Istories and MediaZona examining elder abuse in Russia, which experts fear may worsen during the pandemic with so many people staying home.
Economies around the world have taken a big hit as countries implement lockdown measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from May 4 to 10 finds The New York Times looking into businesses that could be potential infection super-spreaders, and the alarmingly high unemployment rate, while German news media NDR and ZDF heute have examined lost life expectancy due to COVID-19 and the importance of intensive care beds. While Reuters published an important analysis into the use of little-known law that is increasingly being used to grant immunity to police who have used excessive force.
What will life be like after the coronavirus lockdown measures are relaxed? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 27 to May 3 finds German news outlets ZDF heute and RBB24 looking into pedestrian traffic in Germany post-quarantine, the Financial Times and The New York Times highlighting the complexities of getting an accurate COVID-19 death toll and the problem of undercounting fatalities, and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention setting up a dashboard to track statistics related to the coronavirus across the region.
