Articles
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Articles tagged: data
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Choose Your Own Mad Libs (or, how you can plug data into automated stories and free up lots of reporting time)
By Mike Stucka
Posted onFrom housing prices to weather to employment, templates can generate hundreds of stories at once about numbers that people care about.
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How California newsrooms teamed up to gather pandemic data
By Vignesh Ramachandran
Posted onData journalists from eight California newsrooms all benefit from a joint data-collection effort. Here’s how the collaboration works to free up more time for local journalism.
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The conversations local newsrooms should be having about COVID-19 coverage
By Ryan Pitts
Posted onWe spent August and September in conversation with local journalists covering COVID-19, asking what they need most
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Introducing Workbench, an Open Source Platform
By Pierre Conti, Adam Hooper, and Jonathan Stray
Posted onFive great things you can do with Workbench, whether you want to scrape a site, clean data, analyze data, or learn data journalism without code.
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The Totally Incomplete Guide to Finding and Publishing Data
By Amanda Hickman
Posted onWhether you’re a seasoned data journalist or brand new to thinking about data as a source in your reporting, there are exceptional places to find data that you may never have considered.
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Don’t Delete Evil Data
By Lam Thuy Vo
Posted onThere’s a lot of bad data floating around—bad as in abusive or part of a criminal enterprise—and we should archive it, structure it and make it accessible to the public.
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Democracy Depends on How We Archive and Share Data
By Mar Cabra
Posted onWhat we do with data and documents after our reporting is done has a significant effect on the health of our democracies, says Mar Cabra, former head of the ICIJ Data & Research Unit.
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Data Stories That Aren’t Downers
By Erin Kissane
Posted onLast week, ProPublica’s Olga Pierce wrote to the NICAR-L list asking for help putting together a list of “happy data stories” or stories related to the arts, at the request of some of her students.
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How to Save DNAInfo/Gothamist Bylines
By Erin Kissane
Posted onThe owner of the DNAInfo and Gothamist family of local news websites shut the sites down today, which means that not only are all their 115 journalists out of work, but all their bylines—and all the vital information in their years of reporting—is gone.
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What We Learned from Staring at Social Media Data for a Year
By Lam Thuy Vo
Posted onThe things you learn from staring at social media data for a year.
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SRCCON Spotlight: Keeping Data Stories Human
By Erin Kissane and William Wolfe-Wylie
Posted onOne of the SRCCON 2016 sessions that attendees talked about most was “Keeping People at the Forefront of Data Stories,” facilitated by William Wolfe-Wylie and based on his experience working on the CBC News project, “Missing and Murdered: The Unsolved Cases of Indigenous Women and Girls.”
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Competition Be Damned
By Erin Kissane
Posted onLast Wednesday, the Trump Inaugural Committee’s FEC filing appeared on the FEC site in its horrible hand-delivered image-PDF glory. ProPublica’s Derek Willis noted its arrival on Twitter.
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Cleaner, Smarter Spreadsheets Start with Structure
By Sandhya Kambhampati
Posted onMake better spreadsheets by thinking about structure, from the beginning.
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Notes on Working with Big-ish Data
By Mike Stucka
Posted onI finished a project with a home-built table that was about 16GB, some 60 million rows by 110ish fields. It was…big. Sometimes it was painful. Mostly, though, it worked out, and it got us what I think is a damned good story. Anyway, I think it was Ben Welsh who’d observed something like: We have some good tools to work with Big Data, but not great tools for data that’s not quite so big. I ran into that situation.
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How The Chicago Reporter Made ‘Settling for Misconduct’
By Matt Kiefer and Julia Smith
Posted onIn researching Settling for Misconduct, we had to account for details from hundreds of county and federal court filings, identify thousands of officers named in civil complaints and tally hundreds of millions of dollars in monetary awards. We also needed thorough reporting to connect issues of police misconduct to fiscal accountability. And oh yeah – we had to have a slick web app to present the data to the public.
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What I Learned Recreating One Chart Using 24 Tools
By Lisa Charlotte Rost
Posted onLessons learned from trying to create one chart with as many applications, libraries, and programming languages as possible.
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Introducing Elex, a Tool to Make Election Coverage Better for Everyone
By Jeremy Bowers and David Eads
Posted on“End the elections arms race” has become a rallying cry in American data journalism. Many newsrooms spend tremendous resources writing code to simply load and parse election data. It’s time we stopped worrying about the plumbing and started competing on the interesting parts. We decided it was time we put some code against our beliefs – our contribution is a tool we’re calling Elex. And it needs your help, too.
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Introducing agate: a Better Data Analysis Library for Journalists
By Christopher Groskopf
Posted onMeet agate, a Python data analysis library optimized not for performance, but for the performance of the human who is using it. That means focusing on designing code that is easy to learn, readable, and flexible enough to handle any weird data you throw at it. Here’s why you should try it.
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Tracking Amtrak 188
By Michael Keller
Posted onHow curiosity and tinkering let Al Jazeera America publish historical data for a derailed train’s route without Amtrak’s cooperation.
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Automating Transparency
By Ed Summers
Posted onSometimes you write a piece of software and it gets used for purposes you didn’t quite imagine at the time. Sometimes you write a piece of software and it unexpectedly rearranges your life.
I tested how well ChatGPT can pull data out of messy PDFs (and here’s a script so you can too)