It’s that time of year when students get their marks and with them, sometimes, disappointment, frustration or outright confusion. These emotions tend to arise, I think, because students and academics often have very different perceptions of what marks mean.
So here are four reasons why your mark does not matter in the way you think it does – as well as some pointers to making sure things are kept in perspective. Continue reading
It’s that time of year when students get their marks and the usual protests are made. I say “usual” because these tend to follow a particular pattern – and I want to explore why that happens, because I think students and academics often have very different perceptions of what marks mean.
So here are four reasons why your mark does not matter in the way you think it does – as well as some pointers to making sure things are kept in perspective.
Marks measure a number of things, but primarily they (should) measure whether you can demonstrate that you have learned key principles covered in the course. They do not measure your ability. They are not a measure of you as a person. They measure a very specific thing in very specific ways.
This is often the hardest thing to explain to students – particularly those who are extremely talented, but have received bad marks. I might know you are first class; you know you are first class; but that has to be demonstrable and transparent in a piece of work and accompanying documentation not just to me but to a second marker, a moderator and an external examiner (in the UK at least).
This is particularly important when the skills being taught are not just craft skills but involve issues such as research, law, project management, and analysis.
These are skills that sometimes have to be explicitly demonstrated outside of the project they relate to in an evaluation or report. In the field of online journalism – where things are still in flux and part of your skill is being able to follow those changes – I think they are particularly important (They can also often generate objections on the grounds of being too ‘theoretical’, but the point is that these are not objects of abstract study but are intended make you a better practitioner.)
The key advice here is: read the brief, and make sure any documentation explicitly addresses the areas mentioned.
That said, don’t think that you can blag a pass mark through documentation alone – the project will give the lie to that.
You can spend twice as much time as somebody else on a project, and still get lower marks. Some people are naturally good at things, and for others it takes a long time. Life’s a bitch.
But also, often, it’s about a lack of focus and planning: spending 20 hours writing blog posts is not going to be as successful as if you spent half of that time reading other blog posts to get a feel for the medium; researching your subject matter; and re-writing what you have written to make it better.
Put another way: it’s better to do something wrong once, then review it and do it better second time, than do it wrong 10 times without reflection.
If your article is published in a magazine or newspaper, that’s good – but it doesn’t mean that it’s of professional quality. Some editors have low standards – especially if they aren’t paying and need to fill space at short notice.
Likewise, your blog post may have accumulated 3,000 hits – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it meets the requirements of the brief.
To reiterate point 1: marks measure something very specific. They do not measure you as a person, or even the project as a whole. That’s not to undermine your achievements in getting so many hits or selling an article – those are things you should be rightly proud of (and mention at every interview).
I exaggerate, of course. But you shouldn’t take marks too seriously. If you only wanted to pass a module and move on, then move on – it’s quite likely your lack of investment in the subject that was the reason for low marks. If you want a good mark because you want a good degree classification, then you should be using your time effectively and reading feedback from previous assignments – but also be aware of the way that degrees are classified (it’s often more complex than you might assume).
But if you want to be better in the areas that were being measured, then read the feedback – and ask for more if you need to (academics have learned that lengthy written feedback doesn’t tend to be read by students and so keep it short, but are generally happy to talk to you in depth if you want to).
Sometimes the feedback will sound much better than the mark indicates. This quite often comes down to language and style: being ‘sound’ might seem good to you, but in the language of the assessment bands it typically means average or, more often, below average; ‘good’ and ‘excellent’ are equivalents for higher categories. Negative feedback is often sandwiched between positive feedback.
Don’t underestimate how hard it is to get a high mark at undergraduate – and especially postgraduate – level. You may be used to high grades, but the bar is raised at each level. Anything above 60% (in the UK) is actually very good. The average is generally around 58% – anything higher or lower will require explanation for external examiners (who check that marking is consistent across institutions).
To get a first class mark typically means you have to perform at the top level in every category being assessed. That’s in italics for a reason: you might be the greatest writer the world has ever known, but your research isn’t first rate. You might have spent hours scouring official documents for an international scoop (yes, I’m exaggerating again) but your understanding of the legal ramifications was flawed. And so on.
But here’s the thing: given the choice between a great mark and a great story, I think you should go for the latter.
Caveats: this is assuming that your objective is to get a job in journalism, and you are confident of passing. Also, always have a backup plan if the story falls through.
The marks are only a signpost along your journey through education. If you write a blinding blog post, be proud of it regardless of where it ranks against the criteria it was being formally assessed on.
Marks, and the accompanying feedback, are there to focus your attention on blind spots and weak spots in your work. Use them in that way – but don’t use them to rate yourself or to compare yourself with others. Once you start playing a game of high score rankings, you’ve already lost.
It’s been a while – here’s a new Hyperlocal Voices interview, with South Norwich News, an 18 month-old site set up by former BBC journalist Claire Wood and her husband Tom when she “wanted to test the hypothesis that people’s interest in local news actually only spans a relatively small area.” In the process they discovered the power of social networks and how to avoid the deadline-induced reliance on press releases.
South Norwich News was set up by myself and my husband, Tom Wood, who runs a design agency who specialise in advising online clients on how to make their websites more user-friendly. Using his knowledge, we drew up the information architecture for the site and then found a web developer who could put our ideas into place.
We came across the idea of hyperlocal news sites being set up and growing in popularity in the States. As a former BBC journalist, I wanted to test the hypothesis that people’s interest in local news actually only spans a relatively small area and that their interest wanes when the stories come from further afield.
In a way I wanted to reclaim the idea of “local news” to mean news that actually matters to you because it’s happening near to where you live. I want to make the news relevant for readers.
I also wanted a way to return to the patch reporting I did in my early days with the BBC, step away from “churnalism” and start setting my own news agenda, dependant on what I believed local people were interested in.
We launched in January 2010. In the previous 6 months I started building up contacts, exploring what sort of stories might be of interest to people who live in the area and building the website.
Our site is built on WordPress with some customised changes.
We looked the USA at sites. There were two or three being set up in New York for example, sometimes funded as an experiment by traditional news titles.
We’re very much in the news business but on a very small scale. We wanted to get away from deadlines and pressures that cause papers and news bulletins to churn out the same press releases across the day.
Some big stories we can’t avoid covering along with the local paper or radio station, but we always try to find a different angle. There’s little point covering the same stories that people can find elsewhere.
As we become more established, it becomes easier to set our own agenda. We aim to delve a little deeper into stories which matter to people locally which other news outlets might not be able to do in such detail..
Google Analytics gives us a really good insight into which stories interest people the most. We were often surprised by the stories which gained the most traffic. People like hearing about things that are new to the area and also like detailed information on events such as the parade route for Norwich City Football Club’s successful promotion-winning team. We’ve adapted the sort of stories we cover in response to Google analytics research.
After about 6 months, we launched a new Features section, for stories which aren’t strictly “news” but are still of interest to our readers. This allows us to run advertorial features in this section too, which is one of our revenue streams.
Last month we had close to 6,000 unique visitors, with 18,000 page views. This has grown month on month since setting up.
I wouldn’t call it a blog. It’s based on WordPress and takes the form of a “blog” but we offer an online news service on a very local level.
Anecdotally, our readers like the service we provide. I think Twitter and Facebook have had a huge impact on our ability to spread our stories to a wider audience, without which we might have floundered.
Google have launched a ‘Search by Image’ service which allows you to find images by uploading, dragging over, or pasting the URL of an existing image.
The service should be particularly useful to journalists seeking to verify or debunk images they’re not sure about.
(For examples where it may have been useful, look no further than this week’s Gay Syrian Blogger story, as well as the ‘dead’ Osama Bin Laden images that so many news outlets fell for)/
TinEye, a website and Firefox plugin, does the same thing – but it will be interesting to see if Google’s service is more or less powerful (let me know how you get on with it) Find it here. Video here.
I’ve been meaning to write a post for some time breaking down all the habits and hacks I’ve acquired over the years – so this month’s Carnival of Journalism question on ‘Hacking your journalism workflow’ gave me the perfect nudge.
Picking those habits apart is akin to an act of archaeology. What might on the surface look very complicated is simply the accumulation of small acts over several years. Those acts range from the habits themselves to creating simple shortcuts and automated systems, and learning from experience. So that’s how I’ve broken it down:
Shortcuts are such a basic part of my way of working that it’s easy to forget they’re there: bookmarks in the browser bar, for example. Or using the Chrome browser because its address bar also acts as a search bar for previous pages.
I realise I use Twitter lists as a shortcut of sorts – to zoom in on particular groups of people I’m interested in at a particular time, such as experts in a particular area, or a group of people I’m working with. Likewise, I use folders in Google Reader to periodically check on a particular field – such as data journalism – or group – such as UK journalists. Continue reading
The EFF have an interesting investigation into WSJ and Al-Jazeera ‘leaks’ sites and terms and conditions which suggest users’ anonymity is anything but protected:
“Despite promising anonymity, security and confidentiality, AJTU can “share personally identifiable information in response to a law enforcement agency’s request, or where we believe it is necessary.” SafeHouse’s terms of service reserve the right “to disclose any information about you to law enforcement authorities” without notice, then goes even further, reserving the right to disclose information to any “requesting third party,” not only to comply with the law but also to “protect the property or rights of Dow Jones or any affiliated companies” or to “safeguard the interests of others.” As one commentator put it bluntly, this is “insanely broad.” Neither SafeHouse or AJTU bother telling users how they determine when they’ll disclose information, or who’s in charge of the decision.”
Another FAQ:
It’s hard to say because the fact that it’s mobile is not always very visible – but @documentally’s work is always interesting. The Telegraph’s use of Twitter and Audioboo during its coverage of the royal wedding was well planned, and Paul Lewis at the Guardian uses mobile technology well during his coverage of protests and other events. Generally the reporting of these events – in the UK and in the Arab Spring stories – includes lots of good examples.
Neither really – I just think it’s a tool of the job that’s particularly useful when you’re covering a moving event where you don’t have time or resources to drive a big truck there.
Very much so – especially as 3G and wifi coverage expands, mobile phones become more powerful, the distribution infrastructure improves (Twitter etc.) and more journalists see how it can be done.
But broadcast is the wrong word when you’re publishing from a situation where a thousand others are doing the same. It needs to be plugged into that.
It already is. The story almost always takes priority over production considerations. We’ve seen that time and again from the July 7 bombing images to the Arab Spring footage. We’ll settle for poor production values as long as we get the story – but we won’t settle for a poor story, however beautifully produced.
Trinity Mirror bought a truckload of N97s and N98s and laptops for its reporters a couple years back, and encouraged them to go out, and various news organisations are giving reporters iPhones and similar kit – but that’s just kit. Trinity Mirror also invested in training, which is also useful, and you can see journalists are able to use the kit well when they need to – but as long as the time and staffing pressures remain few journalists will have the time to get out of the office.
Time and staff, and the cultural habits of working to print and broadcast deadlines rather than reporting live from the scene.
Start simple – Twitter is a good way to get started, from simple text alerts to tweeting images, audio and video. Once you’re comfortable with tweeting from a phone, find easy ways to share images, then find a video app like Twitcaster and an audio app like Audioboo. Then it all comes down to being able to spot opportunities on the move.
It never ceases to amaze me how I lack even the most basic computer skills, but that’s one of the reasons I started this blog: to demonstrate and record my fumbling learning steps so that others maybe don’t have to spend so much time being as dazed and confused as I am most of the time…
Anyway, I spent a fair chunk of yesterday trying to find a way of getting started with grappling with CSV data text files that are just a bit too big to comfortably manage in a text editor or simple spreadsheet (so files over 50,000 or so rows, up to low millions) and that should probably be dumped into a database if that option was available, but for whatever reason, isn’t… (Not feeling comfortable with setting up and populating a database is one example…But I doubt I’ll get round to blogging my SQLite 101 for a bit yet…)
Note that the following tools are Unix tools – so they work on Linux and on a Mac, but probably not on Windows unless you install a unix tools package (such as GnuWin – coreutils and sed, which look good for starters…). Another alternative would be to download the Data Journalism Developer Studio and run it either as a bootable CD/DVD, or as a virtual machine using something like VMWare or VirtualBox.
All the tools below are related to the basic mechanics of wrangling with text files, which include CSV (comma separated) and TSV (tab separated) files. Your average unix jockey will look at you with sympathetic eyes if you rave bout them, but for us mere mortals, they may make life easier for you than you ever thought possible…
[If you know of simple tricks in the style of what follows that I haven’t included here, please feel free to add them in as a comment, and I’ll maybe try to work then into a continual updating of this post…]
If you want to play along, why not check out this openurl data from EDINA (data sample; a more comprehensive set is also available if you’re feeling brave: monthly openurl data).
So let’s start at the beginning and imagine your faced with a large CSV file – 10MB, 50MB, 100MB, 200MB large – and when you try to open it in your text editor (the file’s too big for Google spreadsheets and maybe even for Google Fusion tables) the whole thing just grinds to a halt, if doesn’t actually fall over.
What to do?
To begin with, you may want to take a deep breath and find out just what sort of beast you have to contend with. You know the file size, but what else might you learn? (I’m assuming the file has a csv suffix, L2sample.csv say, so for starters we’re assuming it’s a text file…)
The wc (word count) command is a handy little tool that will give you a quick overview of how many rows there are in the file:
wc -l L2sample.csv
I get the response 101 L2sample.csv, so there are presumably 100 data rows and 1 header row.
We can learn a little more by taking the -l linecount switch off, and getting a report back on the number of words and characters in the file as well:
wc L2sample.csv
Another thing that you might consider doing is just having a look at the structure of the file, by sampling the first few rows of it and having a peek at them. The head command can help you here.
head L2sample.csv
By default, it returns the first 10 rows of the file. IF we want to change the number of rows displayed, we can use the -n switch:
head -n 4 L2sample.csv
As well as the head command, there is the tail command; this can be used to peek at the lines at the end of the file:
tail L2sample.csv
tail -n 15 L2sample.csv
When I look at the rows, I see they have the form:
logDate logTime encryptedUserIP institutionResolverID routerRedirectIdentifier ... 2011-04-04 00:00:03 kJJNjAytJ2eWV+pjbvbZTkJ19bk 715781 ukfed ... 2011-04-04 00:00:14 /DAGaS+tZQBzlje5FKsazNp2lhw 289516 wayf ... 2011-04-04 00:00:15 NJIy8xkJ6kHfW74zd8nU9HJ60Bc 569773 athens ...
So, not comma separated then; tab separated…;-)
If you were to upload a tab separated file to something like Google Fusion Tables, which I think currently only parses CSV text files for some reason, it will happily spend the time uploading the data – and then shove it into a single column.
I’m not sure if there are column splitting tools available in Fusion Tables – there weren’t last time I looked, though maybe we might expect a fuller range of import tools to appear at some point; many applications that accept text based data files allow you to specify the separator type, as for example in Google spreadsheets:
I’m personally living in hope that some sort of integration with the Google Refine data cleaning tool will appear one day…
If you want to take a sample of a large data file and put into another smaller file that you can play with or try things out with, the head (or tail) tool provides one way of doing that thanks to the magic of Unix redirection (which you might like to think of as a “pipe”, although that has a slightly different meaning in Unix land…). The words/jargon may sound confusing, and the syntax may look cryptic, but the effect is really powerful: take the output from a command and shove it into a file.
So, given a CSV file with a million rows, suppose we want to run a few tests in an application using a couple of hundred rows. This trick will help you generate the file containing the couple of hundred rows.
Here’s an example using L2sample.csv – we’ll create a file containing the first 20 rows, plus the header row:
head -n 21 L2sample.csv > subSample.csv
See the > sign? That says “take the output from the command on the left, and shove it into the file on the right”. (Note that if subSample.csv already exists, it will be overwritten, and you will lose the original.)
There’s probably a better way of doing this, but if you want to generate a CSV file (with headers) containing the last 10 rows, for example, of a file, you can use the cat command to join a file containing the headers with a file containing the last 10 rows:
head -n 1 L2sample.csv > headers.csv
tail -n 20 L2sample.csv > subSample.csv
cat headers.csv subSample.csv > subSampleWithHeaders.csv
(Note: don’t try to cat a file into itself, or Ouroboros may come calling…)
Another very powerful concept from the Unix command line is the notion of | (the pipe). This lets you take the output from one command and direct it to another command (rather than directing it into a file, as > does). So for example, if we want to extract rows 10 to 15 from a file, we can use head to grab the first 15 rows, then tail to grab the last 6 rows of those 15 rows (count them: 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15):
head -n 15 L2sample.csv | tail -n 6 > middleSample.csv
Try to read in as an English phrase (the | and > are punctuation): take the the first [head] 15 rows [-n 15] of the file L2sample.csv and use them as input [|] to the tail command; take the last [tail] 6 lines [-n 6] of the input data and save them [>] as the file middleSample.csv.
If we want to add in the headers, we can use the cat command:
cat headers.csv middleSample.csv > middleSampleWithHeaders.csv
We can use a pipe to join all sorts of commands. If our file only uses a single word for each column header, we can count the number of columns (single words) by grabbing the header row and sending it to wc, which will count the words for us:
head -n 1 L2sample.csv | wc
(Take the first row of L2sample.csv and count the lines/words/characters. If there is one word per column header, the word count gives us the column count…;-)
Sometimes we just want to split a big file into a set of smaller files. The split command is our frind here, and lets us split a file into smaller files containing up to a know number of rows/lines:
split -l 15 L2sample.csv subSamples
This will generate a series of files named subSamplesaa, subSamplesab, …, each containing 15 lines (except for the last one, which may contain less…).
Note that the first file will contain the header and 14 data rows, and the other files will contain 15 data rows but no column headings. To get round this, you might want to split on a file that doesn’t contain the header. (So maybe use wc -l to find the number of rows in the original file, create a header free version of the data by using tail on one less than the number of rows in the file, then split the header free version. You might then one to use cat to put the header back in to each of the smaller files…)
A couple of other Unix text processing tools let us use a CSV file as a crude database. The grep searches a file for a particular term or text pattern (known as a regular expression, which I’m not going to cover much in this post… suffice to note for now that you can do real text processing voodoo magic with regular expressions…;-)
So for example, in out test file, I can search for rows that contain the word mendeley
grep mendeley L2sample.csv
We can also redirect the output into a file:
grep EBSCO L2sample.csv > rowsContainingEBSCO.csv
If the text file contains columns that are separated by a unique delimiter (that is, some symbol that is only ever used to separate the columns), we can use the cut command to just pull out particular columns. The cut command assumes a tab delimiter (we can specify other delimiters explicitly if we need to), so we can use it on our testfile to pull out data from the third column in our test file:
cut -f 3 L2sample.csv
We can also pull out multiple columns and save them in a file:
cut -f 1,2,14,17 L2sample.csv > columnSample.csv
If you pull out just a single column, you can sort the entries to see what different entries are included in the column using the sort command:
cut -f 40 L2sample.csv | sort
(Take column 40 of the file L2sample.csv and sort the items.)
We can also take this sorted list and identify the unique entries using the uniq command; so here are the different entries in column 40 of our test file:
cut -f 40 L2sample.csv | sort | uniq
(Take column 40 of the file L2sample.csv, sort the items, and display the unique values.)
(The uniq command appears to make comparaisons between consecutive lines, hence the nee to sort first.)
The uniq command will also count the repeat occurrence of unique entries if we ask it nicely (-c):
cut -f 40 L2sample.csv | sort | uniq -c
(Take column 40 of the file L2sample.csv, sort the items, and display the unique values along with how many times they appear in the column as a whole.)
The final command I’m going to mention here is magic search and replace operator called sed. I’m aware that this post is already over long, so I’ll maybe return to this in a later post, aside from giving you a tease of scome scarey voodoo… how to convert a tab delimited file to a comma separated file. One recipe is given by Kevin Ashley as follows:
sed 's/"/\"/g; s/^/"/; s/$/"/; s/ctrl-V<TAB>/","/g;' origFile.tsv > newFile.csv
(See also this related question on #getTheData: Converting large-ish tab separated files to CSV.)
Note: if you have a small amount of text and need to wrangle it on some way, the Text Mechanic site might have what you need…
This lecture note on Unix Tools provides a really handy cribsheet of Unix command line text wrangling tools, though the syntax does appear to work for me using some of the commands as given their (the important thing is the idea of what’s possible…).
If you’re looking for regular expression helpers (I haven’t really mentioned these at all in this post, suffice to say they’re a mechanism for doing pattern based search and replace, and which in the right hands can look like real voodoo text processing magic!), check out txt2re and Regexpal (about regexpal).
TO DO: this is a biggie – the join command will join rows from two files with common elements in specified columns. I canlt get it working properly with my test files, so I’m not blogging it just yet, but here’s a starter for 10 if you want to try… Unix join examples
Another series of questions I’ve been asked – with my answers, published here because I don’t want to repeat myself…
1. You have written that people read blogs and other user generated content because they trust the person not the brand; they link or contribute to that content because ‘a journalist invested social capital’ and trust is related to their reputation, knowledge and connections. In a sense I guess reputation, knowledge and connections is what also underpins trust in curated content (e.g. Storyful). My question is whether this informal reliance on the dynamics of social capital is enough to differentiate what Storyful refers to as the ‘news from the noise’ both for ‘curated’ news and online journalism more widely. Or would, for example, a self-regulatory Code be helpful in making this differentiation transparent?
I think a more sophisticated way of looking at this is that people draw on a range of ‘signals’ to make a judgement about the trustworthiness of content: that includes their personal history of interactions with the author; the author’s formal credentials, including qualifications and employer; the author’s network; the author’s behaviour with others; numerous other factors including for example ratings by strangers, friends and robots; and of course the content itself – is the evidence transparent, the argument /narrative logical, etc.
A self-regulatory Code would add another signal – but one that could be interpreted either way: some will see it as a badge of credibility; others as a badge of ‘sell-out’ or pretence to authority. The history of previous attempts suggest it would not particularly succeed.
I’m by no means an expert on trust – would be interesting to explore more literature on that.
2. The PCC has welcomed online journalists to join it – is there interest among the online journalism community? I appreciate the level of antipathy expressed in the blogging community when this was raised late 2009, but I wonder whether the current consultation in relation to live electronic communications for court reporting by accredited journalists could raise the significance of notions of accreditation (through the PCC or independent to it) for online journalists.
Many people blog precisely because they feel that the press does not self-regulate effectively: in a sense they are competing with the PCC (one academic described bloggers as ‘Estate 4.5’). It has a bad reputation – to stand any change of attracting bloggers it would have to give them a genuine voice and incorporate many of the ethical concerns that they have about journalism. I don’t see that happening.
Accreditation is a key issue, however – or at least respectability to advertisers; some bloggers are moving away from calling themselves ‘blogs’ as they look for more ad revenue. But they are a minority: most do not rely on ad revenue. As access to courts and council meetings is explicitly widened, accreditation is less of a problem.
3. If on-line journalists were to consider self regulation what would be the key principles that might inform it: accuracy, fairness, privacy? What of harm and in particular protection of the under 18’s? Or are such notions irrelevant in the world of social capital?
This post – http://paulbradshaw.wpengine.com/2011/03/07/culture-clash-journalisms-ideology-vs-blog-culture/ – is a good summary of how I think the two compare. Most bloggers see themselves as fiercely ethical and you will frequently see them rise up to defend the vulnerable – sometimes unaware of their intimidatory power in attacking those they see as responsible. You will also see them correcting inaccurate reporting.
If anything these notions are more important in a world of social capital: my accuracy, fairness and treatment of the vulnerable dictates part of my social capital. If I make a mistake, my social capital can be damaged for a long time to come – we don’t yet have any concept of our social crimes ‘expiring’ online.
A Very Dangerous Doctor is a Channel 4 documentary about David Southall, the controversial doctor who was struck off after “abusing his position” in accusing a mother of killing her son.
The documentary includes CCTV footage of parents smothering their children, filmed covertly as part of Southall’s research into cot deaths. The footage is incredibly distressing – the Independent rightly describe it as “among the most shocking to be shown on TV”. Many tweeted that they were switching off the 100-minute broadcast – barely five minutes in – as a result.
The documentary is an excellent piece of work, and worth watching in full – but the CCTV footage raises an old ethical issue in a new context: is it justified?
There is a wealth of literature on the ethics of war reporting: whether distressing images should be shown, and the arguments for and against.
The spread of CCTV and mobile phone footage, its accessibility and its release by police authorities and availability on YouTube, raises similar questions – whether it is footage of a woman throwing her baby on the floor, race attacks, or the death of a protestor.
What are the questions to ask when you are given such footage? What are the ethical issues to balance? And what about this specific example (the footage begins around 04’25)? I’d love to know what you think.
Online Journalism Blog 