Opinion meter. History - British History in depth: British History Timeline. Map of Metal.
Data journalism. Influence Networks: The six degrees of investigative journalism. In October, 2010, during the Personal Democracy Forum in Barcelona, several investigative journalists explained how they managed to uncover corruption using network analysis. One of them, Dejan Milovac, wrote a story about a construction project on the Montenegrin coastline. He deconstructed the financial networks around the resort, and showed how local politicians were involved in an enterprise that was ostensibly going against all environmental rules. Below is the image illustrating result of the investigation: This diagram holds some margin for improvement, beginning with readability. What’s more, the relationships exposed in this investigation could be useful to other journalists working on similar subjects.
As such, reusing Milovac’s work would be a daunting task. Network analysis has become a popular topic in several newsrooms. On the geekier side, Little Sis is another database of relations. How does it work? Let’s take an example. Crowdsourced investigation. More free Web tools. It’s quite possible to find something useful and free online every day. Here are a few sites that might come in handy when you’re looking to send off big files, you need audio or images that won’t get you in copyright trouble or you’re looking to build a portfolio site quickly. 1. WeTransfer.com – a free Web-based service for transfering up to 2GB of files to up to 20 people at once. Need to get large files back to multiple people in the newsroom all at once? Here’s an option. 2) Dig.ccmixter.org - if you’re looking for music to use without fear of copyright violaton, check out this site, or for images to include in a graphic or a blog post, look to Compfight.com. 3) Flavors.me - for all those soon-to-be graduates of journalism schools out there.
Thanks to Jeremy Caplan, Director of Education for the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, for these cool tools. Blog Archive » 10 things every journalist should know about data. Every journalist needs to know about data. It is not just the preserve of the investigative journalist but can – and should – be used by reporters writing for local papers, magazines, the consumer and trade press and for online publications.
Think about crime statistics, government spending, bin collections, hospital infections and missing kittens and tell me data journalism is not relevant to your title. If you think you need to be a hacker as well as a hack then you are wrong. Although data journalism combines journalism, research, statistics and programming, you may dabble but you don’t need to know much maths or code to get started. You can find out more about getting started and trying your hand at complex data journalism at news:rewired – noise to signal, on 27 May.
Here are 10 reasons to give data a go. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. A full agenda for news:rewired – noise to signal, is here. Related posts. Scraping for Journalism: A Guide for Collecting Data. Photo by Dan Nguyen/ProPublica Our Dollars for Docs news application lets readers search pharmaceutical company payments to doctors. We’ve written a series of how-to guides explaining how we collected the data. Most of the techniques are within the ability of the moderately experienced programmer. The most difficult-to-scrape site was actually a previous Adobe Flash incarnation of Eli Lilly’s disclosure site. Lilly has since released their data in PDF format. These recipes may be most helpful to journalists who are trying to learn programming and already know the basics. If you are a complete novice and have no short-term plan to learn how to code, it may still be worth your time to find out about what it takes to gather data by scraping web sites -- so you know what you’re asking for if you end up hiring someone to do the technical work for you.
The tools With the exception of Adobe Acrobat Pro, all of the tools we discuss in these guides are free and open-source. A Guide to the Guides. How to: get started in data journalism using Google Fusion Tables | How to succeed in journalism. An intensity map showing the population density for different ethnic groups in Texas What is it? Google Fusion Tables allows users to create data visualisations such as maps, charts, graphs and timelines.
You can see five great examples of data journalism using Google Fusion Tables here. "Google Fusion is easy", claimed James Ball data journalist from the Guardian investigations team and former chief data analyst for Bureau of Investigative Journalism, during a recent talk. "You would say that", I thought. So decided to test it out for myself. The verdict: he was right, it is fairly easy to get started. 1. Datasets like: Those are the most recently published datasets in three categories – so you can see how much potential there is for data to inspire news stories. 2. 3. Select the row number your column names are in from the drop down and click 'next'. Fill in the requested information (your source and a link) and click 'finish'. 4. 5.
Here are a few we made earlier. Journalists' Toolkit. Many Eyes. Data Visualisation Stuff. Ddo. Information Is Beautiful | Ideas, issues, knowledge, data - visualized! Mapize.com : Data Visualization & Mapping. Power of Data Visualization - An infographic inspiration site. Data Visualization Platform, Weave, Now Open Source | Civic Commons. With more and more civic data becoming available and accessible, the challenge grows for policy makers and citizens to leverage that data for better decision-making. It is often difficult to understand context and perform analysis. “Weave”, however, helps. A web-based data visualization tool, Weave enables users to explore, analyze, visualize and disseminate data online from any location at any time.
We saw tremendous potential in the platform and have been helping open-source the software, advising on community engagement strategy and licensing. This week, we were excited to see the soft launch of the Weave 1.0 Beta, which went open-source on Wednesday, June 15. Weave is the result of a broad partnership: it was developed by the Institute for Visualization and Perception Research at the University of Massachussetts Lowell, with support from the Open Indicators Consortium, which is made up of over ten municipal, regional, and state member organizations.
About Karl Fogel. Corning. TimelineSetter: Easy Timelines From Spreadsheets, Now Open to All. Talking Points Memo used TimelineSetter to create a timeline featuring events in Wisconsin’s public-sector union struggle. Last week we announced TimelineSetter, our new tool for creating beautiful interactive HTML timelines. Today, after a short private beta with some of our fellow news application developers, we’re opening the code to everyone. How to Install If you’ve got Ruby and Rubygems installed, you can get the package by running: sudo gem install timeline_setter You can also check out the source code from Github. Documentation TimelineSetter’s documentation explains exactly how to jump in and create your first timeline. If you want to see how the JavaScript works, we’ve also annotated the code to make it clear exactly how it’s put together.
Demos not Memos To go along with the open source release, we put together a demo timeline which pulls live tweets from four news organizations and places them in separate series on a timeline. What’s on the Roadmap? 20 Essential Infographics & Data Visualization Blogs. In the tradition of Inspired Mag’s huge lists, here goes a new one – all the blogs with cool data visualization eye candy in the same place!
Enjoy and leave some comments with suggestions, questions and so on. Information is Beautiful Visual Compelxity Flowing Data Indexed Cool Infographics Chart Porn EagerEyes Simple Compelxity Data Visualization Well Formed Sankey Diagrams Cartogrammar Wall Stats Accuracy & Aesthetics iGraphics Explained Junk Charts Many Eyes Juice Analytics Good Magazine Learn the best designing practices with PMI-002 online web designing course. 2010-Narrative-InfoVis.pdf (application/pdf Object) 14 examples of data visualization on the web.
Trend spotting A series of websites use APIs and scrape pages to spot and analyze trends: Fan page analytics – Facebook fan page analytics Zoofs – Most talked about YouTube videos on twitter Fflick – Most tweeted movie titles Politics Ushahidi – creates a dynamic map of the flood emergency and where help is needed after the Haiti earthquake. We Feel Fine Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar has build an engine that constantly scrapes the internet for a list of keywords representing feelings (feeling fine, absurd, abused, etc.) and visually shows them in a visually brilliant way. wefeelfine.org Crimespotting Crimespotting and many other map mashups are made by stamen design company – worth a look. crimespotting.org Real time transit mashups How big really? BBC puts things in perspective by overlaying the affected flood area of Pakistan in July (2010) on a European google map. howbigreally.com City heat map by flickr geotag Some people interpreted the Geotaggers’ World Atlas maps to be maps of tourism.
3 Tips for Engaging Online Communities with Data Visualization. Data visualization is a medium for understanding information that had previously been the domain of scientists and researchers. Today, due to the amount of data available, there is an increasing need to find new ways of understanding what information means that is available through social networks and throughout the Web. Engaging Online Communities is a report we published this week that explores ways to engage with customers. It looks at the tools available to engage, collect and analyze information. A logical next step beyond analysis is to engage communities in ways that helps them understand information. Data visualization is increasingly seen as an effective way to do that. According to a short report by FFunction in Montreal, data visualization has become a way to clearly communicate information that is often quite complex. People are demanding more ways to understand products and services.
Audrée Lapierre of FFunction writes: Leslie Bradshaw is the co-founder of JESS3. Bradshaw: 1. Dipity - Find, Create, and Embed Interactive Timelines. 5 Tools for Online Journalism, Exploration and Visualization - ReadWriteCloud. In our last post on data journalism, we ran across a number of tools that would be helpful for anyone who is interested in how to make sense of data. The tools represent a renaissance in how we make sense of our information culture. They provide context and meaning to the often baffling world of big data. This is a snapshot of what is available. We are relying on the work done by Paul Bradshaw, whose blog is an excellent source about the new world of data journalism. Factual Factual provides simple APIs for building Web and mobile apps. For instance, it provides data on local geographies.
How To Create a Table With Factual on Howcast Socrata Socrata is one of a handful of companies and organizations that are shaping the open data movement in government. Google Fusion Tables Google Fusion Tables is a Google Labs project. Yahoo! Yahoo! OpenHeatMap OpenHeatMap is another example of how to turn data into maps.