Monthly Archives: April 2014

Guest post: How I did it – visualising carpooling patterns in Germany

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Visualising carpool data

In a guest post for OJB, Natalia Karbasova explains how, with no coding experience, she used German carpool data for the basis of a data visualisation project.

Some time ago I was working on a new blog on the sharing economy, lets-share.de. It was high time to add some data-driven stories visualising important issues of the sharing economy, which change our lives.

Mitfahrgelegenheit.de is the popular German version of Carpooling.com. I decided to create a visualization which would show carpooling patterns between cities in Germany and, possibly, reveal hidden connections. Continue reading →

Crowdfunding: what are you paying for?

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Few examples illustrate the complexities of crowdfunding better than Shane Bauer‘s Beacon page to crowdfund $75,000 for a year-long investigation into US prisons. It includes a number of options for “backing” Bauer (a usefully generic term) which fall into 3 broad categories and are worth learning from:

1. Are you paying for content?

crowdfunding subscriptions on Beacon

The most obvious thing to charge for in a crowdfunding operation is content. And so, the most basic options in Bauer’s project (and in most Beacon projects) are subscriptions: monthly, six-monthly, and annual. Continue reading →

My next ebook: Finding Stories in Spreadsheets

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Finding Stories In Spreadsheets ebook cover

In a few weeks I will begin publishing my new ebook: Finding Stories In Spreadsheets.

The book has been written in response to requests from journalists who need a book on Excel aimed at storytellers, not accountants.

Finding Stories In Spreadsheets will outline a range of techniques, including ways to find the ‘needle in the haystack’ in text data, number calculations to make stories clearer, and methods of cleaning and combining data to tell new stories, including getting data ready for maps and charts.

The book will be available for a discounted rate for the first couple of weeks. To be informed when it’s available, register your interest on the Leanpub page.