I was very excited recently to read on the Scraperwiki mailing list that the website was working on making it possible to create an RSS feed from a SQL query. Yes, that’s the sort of thing that gets me excited these days. But before you reach for a blunt object to knock some sense into me, allow me to explain…
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I’ve been working for some time on picking apart the many processes which make up what we call data journalism. Indeed, if you read the chapter on data journalism (blogged draft) in my Online Journalism Handbook, or seen me speak on the subject, you’ll have seen my previous diagram that tries to explain those processes. I’ve now revised that considerably,
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There have been quite a few scraping-related stories that I’ve been meaning to blog about – so many I’ve decided to write a round up instead. It demonstrates just the increasing role that scraping is playing in journalism – and the possibilities for those who don’t know them: Scraping company information Chris Taggart explains how he built a database of
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Over the last few months there’s been something of a roadshow making its way around the country giving journalists, et al. hands-on experience of using Scraperwiki (I haven’t been able to make any of the events, which is shame:-( So what is Scraperwiki exactly? Essentially, it’s a tool for grabbing data from often unstructured webpages, [...]
A week ago I blogged about how the Manchester Evening News were using data visualisation to provide a deeper analysis of the local police force’s experiment in tweeting incidents for 24 hours. In that post Head of Online Content Paul Gallagher said he thought the real benefit would “come afterwards when we can also plot the data over time”. Now
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Last week I spent a thoroughly fascinating day at a hackday for journalists and web developers organised by Scraperwiki. It’s an experience that every journalist should have, for reasons I’ll explore below but which can be summed up thus: it will challenge the way you approach information as a journalist. Disappointingly, the mainstream press and broadcast media were represented by
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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.
On Thursday I’ll be hosting Birmingham’s first ‘Data Coffee’. Guests include The Times’ Jonny Richards, Talis’ Zach Beauvais and a whole bunch of MA Online Journalism students. There’s no agenda for the day – just turn up with questions and we’ll pick each other’s brains. I’m bringing my Mac and an intense desire to get to grips with Python. It’s
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