Session for MA students at City University's Journalism School

1. Data 2: Interrogating,
visualising, mashing
Online Journalism
City University
Paul Bradshaw
Monday, 7 March 2011

2. Themes
5 things you need to know about each
Data journalism in action
Walkthrough
Monday, 7 March 2011

3. Interrogating data
.
Monday, 7 March 2011

4. Monday, 7 March 2011

5. 5 things you need to know about
interrogating data
1. Data always needs cleaning up
2. Treat the ‘source’ like a source
3. Use the right ‘average’ and
percentage
4. Variation over time & space: context
5. Spreadsheet tools are your friend -
but always backup copies
Monday, 7 March 2011

6. Monday, 7 March 2011

7. “What the Independent have done
is confuse the UK’s deficit with our
debt [making] the debt problem
look around eight times worse than
it is. And it used the whole of its
front page to do so.”
- James Ball
Monday, 7 March 2011

8. Monday, 7 March 2011

9. What is the data worth?
Measurement doesn't answer anything if
there's only one variable
Statistical significance
Sample size and selection
Controls and the placebo effect
Read up.
Monday, 7 March 2011

10. 1. Variance is interesting.
2. Variance is different for different
variables and in different
populations.
3. The amount of variance is easily
quantified.
- Philip Meyer, Precision Journalism
Monday, 7 March 2011

11. Getting data in the right form
Data > Text to columns
Find & replace
Conditional formulas:
=IF(condition, if met, if not)
=COUNTIF(range, test)
Monday, 7 March 2011

12. Walkthrough: cleaning data in
Google Refine
Edit cells > common transforms
Edit cells > split multi-valued cells
Facet > text facet
Export...
Monday, 7 March 2011

13. Visualising data
.
Monday, 7 March 2011

14. 5 things you need to know about
visualising data
1. Choose the chart for the purpose
2. It can be used to spot a lead
3. Good design is when there’s nothing
more to take away
4. It should be self-contained & have refs
5. Be careful with scales and classes
Monday, 7 March 2011

15. or http://chartchooser.juiceanalytics.com/
Monday, 7 March 2011

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17. Monday, 7 March 2011

18. What is wrong with this picture?
Monday, 7 March 2011

19. Monday, 7 March 2011

20. http://simplecomplexity.net/statistics-without-context/
Monday, 7 March 2011

21. http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/trifecta-checkup/
Monday, 7 March 2011

22. Visualisation tools
ManyEyes
Tableau
Wordle, Tagxedo
BatchGeo
Gephi
Delicious.com/paulb/visualisation+tools
Monday, 7 March 2011

23. Walkthrough: visualising data
with Google Gadgets
.
Monday, 7 March 2011

24. Walkthrough: visualising data in
ManyEyes
.
Monday, 7 March 2011

25. Mashing data
.
Monday, 7 March 2011

26. 5 things you need to know about
mashing data
1. It is what a journalist does best
2. Look for a point of connection: place?
Person? Company? Date?
3. What an API can do
4. What APIs there are
5. Mashups can be live, updated or
static
Monday, 7 March 2011

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28. Monday, 7 March 2011

29. Mashup tools
Yahoo! Pipes
OpenHeatMap
Mapalist
xFruits
Scraperwiki
Maptube
Monday, 7 March 2011

30. Walkthrough: making mashups
with Yahoo! Pipes
Inputs - Fetch Feed, CSV, Data, Page,
YQL, Flickr, Form
Operators - Filter, Sort, Unique, Union,
Count, Split, Rename, Regex, Unique,
Location extractor, URL Builder
Outputs - Map, Gallery, List, XML, KML
Monday, 7 March 2011

31. Walkthrough: making mashups
with OpenHeatMap
Format the spreadsheet
Publish it as CSV
Copy link
Paste it at OpenHeatMap
Fix any problems
Monday, 7 March 2011

32. Walkthrough: grabbing geo data
with Google Refine
Edit column > Add column by fetching
URLs
Use GREL (Google Refine Expression
Language)
Search web for help & examples
Monday, 7 March 2011

33. Questions?
.
Monday, 7 March 2011

34. Links
OnlineJournalismClasses.tumblr.com
Delicious.com/paulb/cityoj09
Delicious.com/paulb/datajournalism
Delicious.com/paulb/visualisation
Delicious.com/paulb/statistics
Delicious.com/paulb/mashups
Monday, 7 March 2011

35. Lab
Before the lab: play with these
techniques yourself, have problems,
find solutions, raise questions. Install
Google Refine and Tableau on your
laptop to use.
- Visualise, interrogate or mash data
Monday, 7 March 2011

36. Books
Kaiser Fung - Numbers Rule Your World
Ben Goldacre - Bad Science
Donna Wong - The WSJ Guide to
Information Graphics
Brian Suda - A Practical Guide to
Designing with Data
Monday, 7 March 2011