Features / Project
Project Covering the European Elections with Linked Data
The BBC News Labs team explores ways of exposing linked data in public-facing election coverage, and encounters some interesting challenges.
Project Behind the Scenes of “Fewer Helmets, More Deaths”
A visualization story on what happens when states repeal their universal helmet laws attracted some attention last month for both its content and unusual (but well-received) design. We thought it might amuse readers to see how heavily iterated it was, and how certain decision points along the way helped us to sculpt a design that was mobile-centric without compromising fluidity in the desktop version.
Project Lessons from the Project Thunderdome Shutdown
- By Tom Meagher
Project Thunderdome’s former data editor on the ongoing rescue effort for Thunderdome news apps and the things he’d do differently the next time.
Project GDELT and the Problem of Decontextualized Data
Two recent FiveThirtyEight data journalism stories on Nigerian kidnappings use GDELT data in ways that don’t account for that dataset’s sources and biases. Here’s why that matters.
Project Meet Bloomberg’s Dataview
One of our most recent works, “How Americans Die,” is an instance of what we call a “dataview.” The impetus behind dataview was a hope to provide clear and concise storytelling, while giving the supporting data more prominence and explorability.
Project Finding Evidence of Climate Change in a Billion Rows of Data
Seeking to contribute to the climate change conversation, the team at Enigma started to brainstorm ways we could produce a data-driven story on how climate change has played out in the United States. Browsing through NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, we discovered the Global Historical Climatology Network which collects, aggregates, and standardizes daily weather information from more than 90,000 weather stations, dating as far back as 1800. While we come across many incredible public datasets in our work at Enigma, this one immediately stood out for its remarkable combination of geographic granularity and temporal breadth
Project Introducing PourOver and Tamper
PourOver is an attempt to standardize an efficient and extensible model of client-side collection management, weakening reliance on server-side collection operations. Even on modern networks with beefy machines, the roundtrip to a backend is irredeemably slow for responsive UIs. Users aren’t encouraged to explore when every manipulation triggers a half-second pause. With PourOver, the server-trip bottleneck is gone because collection operations are done on the client. The hardest limitation becomes render speed, much simpler to improve upon than the latency of the internet.
Project Introducing FourScore
At the 2014 OpenNews code convening, we took on the task of making a reusable system that could allow other organizations to produce something sentiment grids with a bare minimum of technical know-how. The result was FourScore, a library that allows you to set a few configuration options to produce your very own interactive sentiment grid. It even works in IE8, and maybe doesn’t totally not work in IE7.
Project Introducing Landline and Stateline
Today we’re releasing code to make it easier for newsrooms to produce maps quickly. Landline is an open source JavaScript library for turning GeoJSON data into browser-based SVG maps. It comes with Stateline, which builds on Landline to create U.S. state and county choropleth maps with very little code out-of-the-box.
Project Introducing Pym
- By Jeremy Bowers, Alyson Hurt
- Jeremy Bowers, Tyler Fisher, Christopher Groskopf, Alyson Hurt
- NPR, OpenNews
NPR’s Visuals team breaks down Pym, a new responsive-iframe library and the first project launched from the OpenNews Code Convening.
Project A Bot to Find the Source of Serendipity
Just before Thanksgiving last year, a new novelty Twitter account gained notice in our newsroom. @NYTMinusContext, promising “All Tweets Verbatim From New York Times Content. Not Affiliated with New York Times.” tweeted fragments from Times articles that you might not think twice about while reading in article format. Isolated, though, these phrases can be absurd, surprising, and delightful.
Project An Open Source Bot Factory
- By Albert Sun
Albert Sun from Interactive News team at the New York Times tells how they use Huginn, a Ruby on Rails project, to create automated agents and scheduled tasks.
Project How We Made @NailbiterBot
The first full round of March Madness is Christmas morning for college basketball fans: 2 days, 32 games, lots of upsets and late-game drama. Last week, on the first full day of the tournament, WNYC transportation reporter Jim O’Grady casually mentioned that he couldn’t keep tabs on all the action during the day. He wished he could get a text message whenever a game was coming down to the wire so he would know when to neglect his professional responsibilities and tune in for the end. I started kicking around the idea in my head a little, and after work my colleague Jenny Ye and I decided to take a break from writing weird JavaScript to write some more weird JavaScript. The result was @NailbiterBot, a humble Twitter bot that posts a tweet whenever an NCAA tournament game is close late in the second half.
Project How to Break News While You Sleep
Around 6:25 a.m. I was awakened by a jolt from slipping tectonic plates. The tremor didn’t last very long, and as soon as my window stopped rattling my first thought was to check for an email.
Project Inside the Predict-o-Tron
The HuffPost Predict-o-Tron is a tool we built to let people make their own March Madness bracket predictions using basketball statistics, expert ratings, and results from the past four tournaments.
There are some interesting tidbits to be found in the data, although they all need to be qualified with the understanding that model performance is based on only four years of data, which leaves us at risk of overfitting. This means that slider combinations that appear to do very well for the past four years may not continue to perform as well if expanded to the past 10 years. With that said, it looks like the experts are very good at picking a bracket, taller teams tend to do better than shorter teams, younger teams do better than older teams, and teams with more depth (both in scoring and playing time) do better than teams with less depth.
Project How We Made the SOTU Twitter Visualization
People tweet what they think, when they think it—and, crucially, we wanted to provide a visualization for the State of the Union speech which reflected that. This wouldn’t be a (shudder) word cloud based on frequencies but a way to track the conversation on Twitter as it was directly influenced by the President’s speech.
Project Introducing Source Guides
In the year-and-a-bit we’ve been publishing Source, we’ve built up a solid archive of project walkthroughs, introductions to new tools and libraries, and case studies. They’re all tagged and searchable, but as with most archives presented primarily in reverse-chron order, pieces tend to attract less attention once they fall off the first page of a given section. We’ve also been keeping an eye out for ways of inviting in readers who haven’t been following along since we started Source, and who may be a little newer to journalism code—either to the “code” or the “journalism” part.
Project A Map That Wasn’t a Map
If you want to show information with a geographical component, you should start with a map, right? Not so fast, writes Tasneem Raja. Questioning your assumptions can help you make something much more effective.
Project How We Made “The Fed’s Balancing Act”
The Reuters Graphics team’s unusual Fed interactive grabbed our attention when it appeared late last month and sparked some interesting conversations on Twitter. Reuters Global Head of Graphics Maryanne Murray and Interactive Data Designer Charlie Szymanski kindly wrote up their rationale and process for us.
Project Lessons from the ProPublica/OpenNews Popup News Apps Team
- By Ben Chartoff, Harlo Holmes, Brian Jacobs, Aurelia Moser, Dan Sinker
- Ben Chartoff, Harlo Holmes, Brian Jacobs, Scott Klein, Aurelia Moser, Gabriela Rodriguez, Al Shaw, Dan Sinker, Mike Tigas, Marcos Vanetta
- OpenNews, ProPublica
More things learned about process, expectations, and how to build a functioning team in two days, from Dan Sinker and the 2014 OpenNews Fellows.
