Category Archives: Data Journalism

currybetdotnet: “Hacking the rendition flights” – Stephen Grey at Hacks/Hackers London

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"[The] problem wasn’t so much collecting the data in order to analyse it, but getting the data cleaned up and into a format that made it ready to be analysed. He also made the point that you should pick your story and then get the data to support it, rather than the other way around."

OUseful: Data Referenced Journalism and the Media – Still a Long Way to Go Yet?

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Tony Hirst: "we need data press officers as well as data journalists. Their job would be to put together the tools that support the data churnalist in taking the raw data and producing statistical charts and interpretation from it. Just like the ministerial quote can be reused by the journalist, so the data press pack can be used to hep the journalist get some graphs out there to help them illustrate the story."

ActionAid UK: FTSE 100 tax haven tracker: the data

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"When enquiries to individual companies failed to persuade them to disclose the information, we submitted complaints to Companies House, forcing companies to re-file their annual returns with the information included, and sparking Vince Cable to announce the launch of an investigation. ... Having compiled a full set of subsidiary listings, ActionAid was assisted by company information specialists www.duedil.com to process the data into a useable format. The annual returns, which in most cases were available only as scanned PDF files from Companies House, were converted to text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, after which extensive corrections were made."

Data Driven Journalism: The importance of numeracy for data journalists

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Nicolas Kayser-Bril: "We need to convince journalism schools to teach math in a purpose-oriented fashion. As Gigerenzer said in a 2010 conference, students are taught trigonometry but how to understand risks properly is overlooked. Decision-makers in J-schools and media companies need to realize that data in itself without better numeracy skills will not lead to better journalism. To tell true facts to their audience and to build trust, journalists need to gain the skills to understand and interpret data."

Guardian: The first Guardian data journalism: May 5, 1821

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"Data journalism is not new: the very first Guardian - or Manchester Guardian as it then was - in May 1821 contained a table of data. For the first time, we've extracted that table so you can see it for yourselves. ... The data would seem uncontroversial today: a list of schools in Manchester and Salford, with how many pupils attended each one and average annual spending. It told us, for the first time, how many pupils received free education - and how many poor children there were in the city. In today's world of Ofsted reports and education department school rankings, this list would not seem unusual. In 1821, it caused a sensation. Leaked to the Guardian by a credible source only identified as 'NH'"

Guardian Government Computing: Boundary Commission defends release of pdfs of new constituency boundaries

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"The Boundary Commission for England (BCE) has defended its decision to release more than 500 pdf maps of proposed Parliamentary constituencies, stating that they believe they provided "an appropriate level of detail". ... The decision was criticised by data journalists at the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph for lack of transparency, after the BCE did not provide a more user-friendly single UK map of the new constituency boundaries."

SchoolBook: An Introduction to SchoolBook’s Data

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"The goal: to curate the thousands of public records available about schools in New York City, simplify and standardize their contents, and make it all as easy as possible to understand and compare school to school. ... As you can see on any school page, or when you use our Search + Compare tool, we’ve translated many data points into a 1 to 9 scale, and further labeled 1, 2 and 3 as 'below average;' 4, 5 and 6 as 'average' and 7, 8 and 9 as 'above average'"

Minstry of Justice: Broadcasting in court to be allowed for first time and increased transparency of local court performance

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"[Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke] announced that an unprecedented level of information about the performance of courts will be published in future to allow everyone to see how their local courts are working. ... In addition to allowing broadcasting, Mr Clarke announced that an unprecedented level of information about the performance of courts will be published in future to allow everyone to see how their local courts are working."

Online Journalism Blog: Gathering data: a flow chart for data journalists

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"[A flow chart that] ... aims to help those doing data journalism identify how best to get hold of and deal with data by asking a series of questions about the information you want to compile and making suggestions on ways both to get hold of it and tools to then get it into a state which makes it easier to ask questions."