Tag Archives: filtering

VIDEO: The 3 chords of data journalism

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With just a few basic data journalism techniques you can tell a lot of data journalism stories. I call these the “three chords of data journalism” — a nod to Simon Rogers’s talk on data journalists as the new punks. Those chords are: sorting; filtering; and calculating percentages.

In this third video first made for students on the MA in Data Journalism at Birmingham City University and shared as part of a series of video posts, I walk through how to use those techniques in practice, using gender pay gap data to demonstrate how those techniques can be used to find outliers and potential interviewees; to drill down to a particular category or area in a dataset; and to put figures into context.

Too many election tweets? Some simple Tweetdeck techniques for filtering the information overload

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election2016-hashtags

Tonight many journalists will have Tweetdeck or similar social media dashboards ‘tuned in’ to coverage of the US election, typically by creating columns to monitor activity on key hashtags like #Election2016. But on a big occasion like this, the volume of tweets becomes unmanageable. Here then are a few quick techniques to surface tweets that are likely to be most useful to reporters:

Picking the right hashtags: Hashtagify

Hashtagify is a tool for finding out the popularity of certain hashtags. Type a tag into the search box and you’ll get a network diagram like the one shown above — but you can also switch to ‘Table mode’ to get a list of tags that you can sort by popularity, correlation, weekly or monthly trend. Continue reading →

How to filter out Foursquare tweets

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Sue Llewellyn asks if there’s a way to filter out Foursquare tweets. There is.

The first thing to do is work out something that all the tweets share. Well, every Foursquare tweet includes a link that begins http://4sq.com – so that’s it.

If you’re using Tweetdeck this is how you do it. At the bottom of every column in Tweetdeck are 6 buttons. The second one in – a downward-pointing arrow – is the ‘Filter this column’ button. Click this. A new row appears where you can filter the tweets. Select ‘Text’ then ‘-‘ and type ‘http://4sq.com’ in the third box. You should see tweets automatically filtered accordingly.

Seesmic desktop has a similar filtering function.

And on iPhone a few Twitter clients have filtering options, including Twittelator.

Let me know if you know of any others.