Dataist blog: An inspiring case for journalists learning to code | Dan Nguyen pronounced fast is danwin. About a year ago I threw up a long, rambling guide hoping to teach non-programming journalists some practical code. Looking back at it, it seems inadequate. Actually, I misspoke, I haven’t looked back at it because I’m sure I’ll just spend the next few hours cringing.
For example, what a dumb idea it was to put everything from “What is HTML” to actual Ruby scraping code all in a gigantic, badly formatted post. The series of articles have gotten a fair number of hits but I don’t know how many people were able to stumble through it. Though last week I noticed this recent trackback from dataist, a new “blog about data exploration” by Finnish journo Jens Finnäs. He writes that he has “almost no prior programming experience” but, after going through my tutorials and checking out Scraperwiki, was able to produce this cool network graph of the Ratata blog network after about “two days of trial and error”: Mapping of Ratata blogging network by Jens Finnäs of dataist.wordpress.com. How to make your infographics accessible and SEO friendly at the same time. Infographics are everywhere. Some good - some bad. But most creators don't stop to think how to make sure search engines can understand their infographic - or how people who can't see pictures can consume them (maybe because they rely on screen readers or have chosen not to download images to their mobile phone).
The trick to make infographics accessible and SEO friendly is to ensure: they're chopped into relevant sections (ie not one big image),text is text (you should be able to select it with a mouse)if anything has to be shown as an image, you set appropriate ALT text (the flipside of this is that, if the image doesn't add any information, you DON'T set ALT text - I'll explain this below.)
Making an infographic accessible There's lots of infographics out there. Also I should point out that I'm a crap HTML coder so if anyone can improve on this, do let me know. Separate images and text As it stands, that bottom left bit is just part of an enormous image. What now? OK, you're thinking. Hannah Waldram: How to map: top tips and tools for hyperlocal publishers. Data journalism pt1: Finding data (draft – comments invited)
{*style:<i>The following is a draft from a book about online journalism that I’ve been working on. I’d really appreciate any additions or comments you can make – particularly around sources of data and legal considerations </i>*} The first stage in data journalism is sourcing the data itself. Often you will be seeking out data based on a particular question or hypothesis (for a good guide to forming a journalistic hypothesis see Mark Hunter’s free ebook Story-Based Inquiry (2010)). On other occasions, it may be that the release or discovery of data itself kicks off your investigation. There are a range of sources available to the data journalist, both online and offline, public and hidden. National and local government; bodies that monitor organisations (such as regulators or consumer bodies); scientific and academic institutions; health organisations; charities and pressure groups; business; and the media itself.
Private companies and charities Regulators, researchers and the media Live data. 7 Classic Foundational Vis Papers You Might not Want to Publicly Confess you Don?t Know ? Fell in Love with Data. (In my last post I introduced the idea of regularly posting research material in this blog as a way to bridge the gap between researchers and practitioners. Some people kindly replied to my call for feedback and the general feeling seems to be like: “cool go on! Rock it! We need it!”. Ok, thanks guys your encouragement is very much needed.
I love you all. Even if I am definitely not a veteran of infovis research (far from it) I started reading my first papers around the year 2000 and since then I’ve never stopped. Come from the very early days of infovisare foundationalare cited over and overI like a lot Of course this doesn’t mean these are the only ones you should read if you want to dig into this matter. Advice: in order to really appreciate them you have to think they have all been written during the ’90s (some even in the ’80s!). Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Methods. Please don’t tell me you don’t know this one! Chaîne de kgude. Coding for Journalists 101 : A four-part series | Dan Nguyen pronounced fast is danwin. Photo by Nico Cavallotto on Flickr Update, January 2012: Everything…yes, everything, is superseded by my free online book, The Bastards Book of Ruby, which is a much more complete walkthrough of basic programming principles with far more practical and up-to-date examples and projects than what you’ll find here.
I’m only keeping this old walkthrough up as a historical reference. I’m sure the code is so ugly that I’m not going to even try re-reading it. So check it out: The Bastards Book of Ruby -Dan Update, Dec. 30, 2010: I published a series of data collection and cleaning guides for ProPublica, to describe what I did for our Dollars for Docs project. So a little while ago, I set out to write some tutorials that would guide the non-coding-but-computer-savvy journalist through enough programming fundamentals so that he/she could write a web scraper to collect data from public websites. DISCLAIMER: The code, data files, and results are meant for reference and example only.