Last week I spent a day playing with the screen scraping website Scraperwiki with a class of MA Online Journalism students and a local blogger or two, led by Scraperwiki’s own Anna Powell-Smith. I thought I might take the opportunity to try to explain what screen scraping is through the functionality of Scraperwiki, in journalistic terms. It’s pretty good.
A disturbing discovery by Chris Taggart last week: a number of councils in the UK are handing over their ‘open’ data to a company which only allows it to be downloaded for “personal” use. As Chris himself points out, this runs completely against the spirit of the push to release public data in a number of ways: Data cannot be
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(Read part 1 here and part 2 here) The third student to catch the data journalism bug was Andy Brightwell. Through his earlier reporting on swimming pool facilities in Birmingham, Andy had developed an interest in the issue, and wanted to use data journalism techniques to dig further. The result was a standalone site – Where Can We Swim? –
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If you are a journalist, blogger or developer interested in the possibilities of public data I’d be very happy if you came to a Hack Day I’m involved in, here in Birmingham on Friday July 23. The idea is very simple: we get a bunch of public data, and either find stories in it, or ways to help others find
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Following on from the previous post on serious music journalism using data, here’s some more detail on how MA Online Journalism students have been exploring multimedia journalism. Using data to shed light on dangers for cyclists Dan Davies explored video and mapping audio before catching the data bug – in this case, around cycling collisions. Like Caroline, he sourced data
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I’ve just finished looking at the work from the Diploma stage of my MA in Online Journalism, and – if you’ll forgive the effusiveness – boy is it good. The work includes data visualisation, Flash, video, mapping and game journalism – in short, everything you’d want from a group of people who are not merely learning how to do journalism
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