Archives image by DRs Kulturarvsprojekt
Last week I wrote about the problem with trusting Twitter to keep a public record of all tweets. But it’s not just social networks; we can’t trust any website to keep information on our behalf.
3 recent articles highlight the problem particularly well.
My Birmingham City University colleague Nick Moreton has a neat little hack for connecting a JavaScript app to social media accounts by combining the automation tool IFTTT, and Google Drive. As he explains:
“Most of the big web apps provide their API in JSON format (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) however, as you may know if you’ve ever tried to use these, they often require an OAuth login in order to access the API.”
One of the simplest ways to get started with data journalism techniques is a ‘Get the data’ article.
Start by looking at examples of other ‘Get the data’ articles. A good search for this is:
intitle:"get the data" -getthedata
This searches for the exact phrase “get the data” in the title of the page but also excludes the site getthedata.org (which otherwise dominates results) by using the minus operator.
You can obviously add further terms, such as ‘news’ or ‘finance’, to narrow further.
Here are some examples:
Those three examples show two different types of datablog. The Guardian, for example, take public data which has just been released and make it more accessible to a broader audience. Continue reading
Online Journalism Blog 