Data journalism
Why bits, bytes and stats are your friends
It’s nothing new
The Manchester Guardian 1821
Florence Nightingale – data journalist
Deprivation and Manchester rioters
How we’d look under AV
The War Logs – IED attacks
Go beyond obvious applications
• Sport – BBC’s Ollie Williams has done visualisations around events
• Fashion – I helped Grazia to track the spread of a social media campaign by Twitter scraping
GETTING STARTEDTools and ideas
CAR vs Data journalism
• Computer-Assisted Reporting is an old school name for what is sometimes now called data journalism
• Data was in spreadsheets, databases and surveys
• Also social network analysis tools
Key things to note
• Not a quick process• Too many numbers can confuse your audience
• Know your sources of data• Check it back with the source
Some of the tools of the trade
• Excel• Access• Many Eyes (wikified)• Wordle• Tableau• Google Fusion tables• Google docs spreadsheet• Yahoo pipes• Scraperwiki
Coding is becoming part of journalism
• Some journalists are learning Python, Django, or Ruby to analyse data
• But it doesn’t have to be difficult or hard to work with
Empty properties site:gov.uk filetype:xls
Bolton
Map it
Google Fusion tables
• Location, location, location
• The Lords
Some sites of interest
• Where does my money go• Information is beautiful• Guardian data blog
DATAMINER’S RECIPE FOR GETTING STARTED
10 step plan
Datamineruk’s Top 10 Things for getting
Started in Data Journalism
Data follows
@paulbradshaw - Paul’s list of Godlike Geniuses@jamesrbuk @StephenGrey @DataMinerUK@psychemedia@Coneee@clairemilleruk @kevglobal@bbcsport_ollie