Comments on: Manchester Police tweets and the MEN – local data journalism part 2

By: links for 2010-10-23 « Köszönjük, Emese!

links for 2010-10-23 « Köszönjük, Emese! — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 11:10:19 +0000

[...] Manchester Police tweets and the MEN – local data journalism part 2 | Online Journalism Blog (tags: data journalism visualization local casestudy) [...]

By: links for 2010-10-23 « pabwall

links for 2010-10-23 « pabwall — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 10:01:40 +0000

[...] Médias locaux // Police + PQR = expérience intéressante de datajournalism local (Paul Bradshaw) La rédaction web du Manchester Evening profite du fil Twitter de la police locale pour pour mener une expérience de journalisme de données. (tags: datajournalism journalisme-de-données journalisme visualization faits-divers pqr info-locale hyperlocal police twitter) [...]

By: Paul Bradshaw

Paul Bradshaw — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:41:55 +0000

Thanks Carl – I think it’s to MEN’s credit that any resources at all were allocated, and I hope my previous blog post gives enough credit for using that to dig beyond the novelty angle of the story. I also think the MEN deserve credit for getting involved in the hackday.

Like you, I’m really pleased that *something* went up, and was followed up too. With this post I’m trying to think where the MEN and others might go next, or next time. More broadly, I’m trying to move the data journalism discussion beyond the ‘ooh’ stage!

Paul – the point about ‘raw’ data is a good one that I should have explored more. It also emphasises the role of journalists in cleaning up and contextualising raw data.

By: Paul Gallagher

Paul Gallagher — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:41:00 +0000

Thanks for your interest in this and for your observations. We have had more spinoffs from the data than you mention here as we have been able to to create separate articles for each of our district weekly print titles by narrowing down the dataset to their area – which was one of the main reasons for doing this in the first place.
I think a lot of people elsewhere found it difficult to extract much in the way of useful information from the raw text of the tweets from GMP24 because the police operators did not follow a standard template with regards to geography and category of incident.
To turn the data into information we could use we had to go through all 3,025 tweets and categorise each one according to its district and type.
This required a certain amount of local knowledge and editorial judgement on the reporting of crime – as well as half a dozen willing volunteers – and fortunately we were able to draw on all of these among the staff in the MEN newsroom.
The final spreadsheet is not really ‘raw data’ because it is coloured by our collective judgement on how each tweet should be categorised. There will be errors and differences of opinion in how various people here have interpreted similar tweets. However, with those health warnings in place, I believe we were sufficiently robust in our methods to produce a reliable dataset and we are happy to make it openly available to developers. The spreadsheet can now be downloaded from our site.

By: Carl Johnstone

Carl Johnstone — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:13:33 +0000

Hi, as the developer who did the web work for this I’d like to address a few points. Note that these are my personal views, and not necessarily those of my employer MEN Media.

Currently the (tiny) web development team here are all working on a major project that needs to be finished next week – so the results are from me spending a reasonable amount of personal time on it as it “scratched an itch”. There are loads of things that I would’ve liked to have done with the data, but did what I could with the limited time. I could do more, but realistically in these fast-moving news days, the story is already dead. (Of course given sufficient up-front time we could’ve been doing this live on the day.)

As initially there were no plans to do anything at all like this, I’m really pleased that *something* has gone up. Add to that that as far as I’m aware we’re the only mainstream media organisation that has done anything other than report on the event.

As far as allowing further analysis, most people will have a quick browse – probably looking at the division that equates to where they live – but almost certainly aren’t interested in further analysing the data. That said, following a discussion internally we’ll have a download link up sometime this afternoon.

Finally I’m hoping that this is going to serve as the first baby steps and we’ll be able to do more stuff like this (and better) in the future.