CableSearch is a neat project by the European Centre for Computer Assisted Research and VVOJ (the Dutch-Flemish association for investigative journalists) which aims to make it easier for journalists to interrogate the Wikileaks cables. Although it’s been around for some time, I’ve only just noticed the site’s API, so I thought I’d show how such an API can be useful as a
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Following the post earlier this week on XML and RSS for journalists I wanted to look at another important format for journalists working with data: JSON. JSON is a data format which has been rising in popularity over the past few years. Quite often it is offered alongside – or instead of – XML by various information services, such as
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Reading through the Online Journalism blog post on Getting full addresses for data from an FOI response (using APIs), the following phrase – relating to the composition of some Google Refine code to parse a JSON string from the Google geocoding API – jumped out at me: “This took a bit of trial and error…” [...]
Here’s an example of how APIs can be useful to journalists when they need to combine two sets of data. I recently spoke to Lincoln investigative journalism student Sean McGrath who had obtained some information via FOI that he needed to combine with other data to answer a question (sorry to be so cryptic). He had spent 3 days cleaning
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If you have a spreadsheet containing geographical data such as postcodes you may want to know what constituency they are in, or convert them to local authority. That was a question that Bill Thompson asked on Twitter this week – and this is how I used Google Refine to do that: adding extra columns to a spreadsheet with geographic information.
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