Picking up on Paul Bradshaw’s post A quick exercise for aspiring data journalists which hints at how you can use Google Spreadsheets to grab – and explore – a mortality dataset highlighted by Ben Goldacre in DIY statistical analysis: experience the thrill of touching real data, I thought I’d describe a quick way of analysing [...]
The latest Ben Goldacre Bad Science column provides a particularly useful exercise for anyone interested in avoiding an easy mistake in data journalism: mistaking random variation for a story (in this case about some health services being worse than others for treating a particular condition): “The Public Health Observatories provide several neat tools for analysing data, and one will draw a funnel plot
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Sunny Hundal is the publisher of the UK political blog Liberal Conspiracy. Two weeks ago I hosted a 30 minute Q&A session between Hundal and students at City University, and also interviewed him briefly myself. 3 video clips of the interview (1-2 minutes each) and one of the Q&A (around 30 minutes) are embedded below. These are also published under
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In a guest post for the Online Journalism Blog, Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti explains how participants at an open data event helped crack open data on German aid spending. This post was originally published in German at Hyperland. How does the foreign aid of Germany support other countries? The Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) releases no details, although about 6
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If you deal with information on government departments you may want to offer your help in improving a new project that aims to make it easier to combine government data. Publicbodies.org is attempting to do for government data what OpenCorporates does for company data: create unique resources that allow you to distinguish between similar-sounding departments, and grab extra contextual data
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Something interesting happened to journalism when it moved from print and broadcast to the web. Aspects of the process that we barely thought about started to be questioned: the ‘story’ itself seemed less than fundamental. Decisions that you didn’t need to make as a journalist – such as what medium you would use – were becoming part of the job.
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Here we go again. I’ve been re-reading Kovach and Rosenstiel’s ‘Elements of Journalism’ recently and happened to be in the middle of the chapter on ‘Who journalists work for’ when this popped up in my Twitter stream. Kovach and Rosenstiel make a simple point, and an increasingly important one: we don’t just tell stories for the sake of it; we
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Although I cover blogging in some depth in my online journalism book, I thought I should write a supplementary section on what happens when you decide to start customising your blog. Specifically, I want to address 3 key languages which you are likely to encounter, what they do, and how they work. What’s the difference? HTML, CSS, and PHP Most blog platforms
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One of the highlights of last week’s Global Investigative Journalism Conference was the session on text mining, where the New York Times’s Andy Lehren talked about his experiences of working with data from Wikileaks and elsewhere, and former Washington Post database editor Sarah Cohen gave her insights into various tools and techniques in text mining. Andy Lehren’s audio is embedded below.
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In a move that seemed to upset collectors of UK ministerial meeting data, @whoslobbying, on grounds of wasted effort, the Guardian datastore published a spreadsheet last night containing data relating to ministerial meetings between May 2010 and March 2011. (The first release of the spreadsheet actually omitted the column containing who the meeting was with, [...]
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