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How Canada became an open data and data journalism powerhouse | News. Imagine if you took the historic records of everyone who died in the first world war. Then you matched them to one area to see how it had been affected. Or if you wanted to see if one part of your city had an epidemic of bedbugs. Or if you wanted to find out where the most guns are. This is the work of data journalist Patrick Cain, quietly and methodically producing strikingly interesting maps of his home city of Toronto. It's the pinnacle of what data journalism is supposed to be about. And, if you're looking for innovative data journalism, vast open data resources and the latest open data apps, Canada is a good place to start. Enthralled by open data initiatives around the world, Canadians from Ottawa to Vancouver are embracing spreadsheets as never before – and producing great work which you don't often hear about outside the country. If something is uncontroversial (like dog licences by postal code) there are often no issues about releasing it.

Politically, she says support is growing: Visualisation Insights #4: Visual Thinker. This is the fourth article in my Visualisation Insights series. The purpose of this series is to provide readers with unique insights into the field of visualisation from the different perspectives of those in the roles of designer, practitioner, academic, blogger, journalist and all sorts of other visual thinkers. My aim is to bring together these interviews to create a greater understanding and appreciation of the challenges, approaches and solutions emerging from these people – the visualisation world’s cast and crew. Carlos Gamez Kindelan is a talented Visual Thinker based in Madrid.

He is applying his skills as a highly experienced infographic and multimedia design artist across many different platforms, most notably through his work in the graphics department at lainformacion.com, an innovative online Spanish newspaper, and dMultimedia, his personal blog. I approached Carlos to do an interview for this article for two main reasons. How long have you worked there? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Wikileaks data visualisations: what you did with our Iraq and Afghanistan spreadsheets | News. Turn autoplay off Edition: <span><a href=" Sign in Beta About us Today's paper Subscribe Custom Search Wikileaks data visualisations: what you did with our Iraq and Afghanistan spreadsheets The Wikileaks data we published on Iraq and Afghanistan has encouraged you to produce striking visualisations of the wars' impacts.

Media WikiLeaks Technology Free our data World news UK news Military More from Datablog on Media WikiLeaks Technology Free our data World news UK news Military More blogposts More graphics Facts Are Sacred by Simon Rogers From the war in Afghanistan to the London riots, Facts Are Sacred is a full-colour collection of the most interesting findings from the Guardian datablog. Buy WikiLeaks Buy the book © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Send to a friend Your IP address will be logged Share Close. A Protovis Primer, Part 1. Protovis is a very powerful visualization toolkit. Part of what makes it special is that it is written in JavaScript and runs in the browser without the need for any plugins. Its clever use of JavaScript’s language features makes it very elegant, but it can also be confusing to people who are not familiar with functional programming concepts and the finer points of JavaScript. This multi-part tutorial shows how to create a visualization (my interactive Presidents Chart) in Protovis, and explains the concepts that are involved along the way.

This introduction is based on my experiences with using Protovis in my Visualization and Visual Communication class earlier this spring. This has grown from being a single article into several parts (and is still expanding). Protovis requires a modern browser, which means any recent version of Safari, Chrome, FireFox, or Opera. A Simple Example The following code creates this chart: Let’s look at this line by line.

Function Chaining Marks Bar Layout. How to be a data journalist | News. Data journalism is huge. I don't mean 'huge' as in fashionable - although it has become that in recent months - but 'huge' as in 'incomprehensibly enormous'. It represents the convergence of a number of fields which are significant in their own right - from investigative research and statistics to design and programming. The idea of combining those skills to tell important stories is powerful - but also intimidating. Who can do all that? The reality is that almost no one is doing all of that, but there are enough different parts of the puzzle for people to easily get involved in, and go from there. 1. 'Finding data' can involve anything from having expert knowledge and contacts to being able to use computer assisted reporting skills or, for some, specific technical skills such as MySQL or Python to gather the data for you. 2. 3. 4.

Tools such as ManyEyes for visualisation, and Yahoo! How to begin? So where does a budding data journalist start? Play around. And you know what?