What do my Facebook friends have in common in terms of the things they have Liked, or in terms of their music or movie preferences? (And does this say anything about me?!) Here’s a recipe for visualising that data… After discovering via Martin Hawksey that the recent (December, 2011) 2.5 release of Google Refine allows [...]
When I get a chance, I’ll post a (not totally unsympathetic) response to Milo Yiannopoulos’post The pitiful cult of ‘data journalism’, but in the meantime, here’s a view over some data that was released a couple of days ago – a map of where the New Year Honours went [link] [Hmm... so WordPress.com doesn't seem [...]
In Accessing and Visualising Sentencing Data for Local Courts I posted a couple of quick ways in to playing with Ministry of Justice sentencing data for the period July 2010-June 2011 at the local court level. At the end of the post, I wondered about how to wrangle the data in R so that I [...]
A recent provisional data release from the Ministry of Justice contains sentencing data from English(?) courts, at the offence level, for the period July 2010-June 2011: “Published for the first time every sentence handed down at each court in the country between July 2010 and June 2011, along with the age and ethnicity of each [...]
Over the last couple of years, you’ve probably noticed that data has become a Big Thing in commerce (Big Data for business advantage) as well as in the openness/transparency community, with governments and the media joining the party particularly in the context of the latter. But if you’re looking to develop data journalism skills, it’s [...]
If part of the role of data journalism is to make transparent the justification behind claims that are, or aren’t, backed up by data, there’s good reason to suppose that the journalists should be able to back up their own data-based claims with evidence about how they made use of the data. Posting links to [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
You may or may not have noticed that the Boundary Commission released their take on proposed parliamentary constituency boundaries today. They could have released the data – as data – in the form of shape files that can be rendered at the click of a button in things like Google Maps… but they didn’t… [The [...]
I don’t have time to chase this just now, but it could be handy… Over the last few months, several of Alasdair Rae (University of Sheffield) Google Fusion Tables generated maps have been appearing on the Guardian Datablog, including one today showing the UK’s new Parliamentay constituency boundaries. Looking at Alasdair’s fusion table for English [...]
Recent Comments