talk data to me

journo-geekery: How does Wikipedia deal with a mass shooting? A...

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 14:36:51 -0500

Image via Nieman via brianckeegan.com

Image via Nieman via brianckeegan.com

Image via Nieman via brianckeegan.com

Image via Nieman via brianckeegan.com

Image via Nieman via brianckeegan.com

Image via Nieman via brianckeegan.com

journo-geekery:

How does Wikipedia deal with a mass shooting? A frenzied start gives way to a few core editors » Nieman JLab

Analysis by Brian Keegan, post-doctoral comp sci research fellow at Northeastern, also posted on his own blog. Both copies of which are fascinating:

3,262 unique users edited one or more of these seven articles, 222 edited two or more of these articles, 60 had edited 3 or more, and a single user WWGB had edited all seven within the first 48 hours of their creation. These editors are at the center of Figure 7 where they connect to many of the articles on the periphery. The stars surrounding each of the articles are the editors who contributed to that article and that article alone (in this corpus). WWGB is an editor who appears to specialize not only in editing articles about current events, but participating in a community of editors engaged in the newswork on Wikipedia. These editors are not the first to respond (as above), but their work involves documentingadministrative pages enumerating current events and mediating discussionsacross disparate current events articles. The ability for these collaborations to unfold as smoothly as they do appears to rest on the ability for Wikipedia editors with newswork experience to either supplant or compliment the work done by amateurs who first arrive on the page.

Aside: I don’t like grabbing so much from another site’s post—apologies if it seems too much. I couldn’t decide which graph best conveyed the breadth of analysis for this post. I figured a slideshow was best for helping readers make the biggest comparisons and—hopefully—link through to both the post and to Mr. Keegan’s research.

journo-geekery: What Could Disappear - NYT Maps show coastal...

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 20:43:19 -0500

journo-geekery:

What Could Disappear - NYT

Maps show coastal and low-lying areas that would be permanently flooded, without engineered protection, in three levels of higher seas. Percentages are the portion of dry, habitable land within the city limits of places listed that would be permanently submerged.

These are some of the more drastic inundation at the worst case scenario in the options provided. I highly recommend you try out the different settings and survey the cities.

datanews: Quick shout out to our @datanews folks and the entire...

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 22:59:54 -0500

datanews:

Quick shout out to our @datanews folks and the entire @WNYC digital team for our fantastic election-night map and coverage, particularly to Data News interaction designer Louise Ma who pulled together so much information into such a beautiful page. More posts on the plumbing behind the maps coming soon.

Delayed reblog, but worth mentioning!

Best Digital Coverage of the Nov. 6 Election

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 16:21:21 -0500

Best Digital Coverage of the Nov. 6 Election:

onaissues:

As Americans tuned in to the presidential race on Tuesday, newsrooms around the country experimented with ways to wrangle large amounts of data and provide live updates. Here are some areas where digital journalists created exceptional work:

Illustrating the election
The Guardian put together an interactive illustrated recap of President Obama’s and Gov. Romney’s path to the White House. Wendy McNaughton live-illustrated election night from NPR headquarters, giving readers a glimpse of what radio looks like. (Interested in illustrated journalism? Check out the ONA12 session onwhy comics make good journalism and advice from Erin Polgreen of Symbolia Magazine on how editors can work with comics journalists.)

Watching the voting
Facebook’s real time vote counter was an excellent representation of where people were voting. As voters took to the polls, Instagram was flooded with pictures from people who had voted. The NY Times pulled together a beautiful interactive of the photos. As photos of people’s ballots began to show up on the service and on Twitter, ProPublica and other outlets warned that photographing ballots is illegal in some states.

Tools for voters and journalists
Google’s comprehensive election and polling package included resources to find polling stations and ballots summaries for each state. (Check out more from the ONA12 session Election Tools & Data and look for slides by Google’s Jesse Friedman detailing features of these resources and more.) Wall Street Journal builtwhattimedothepollsclose.com, a searchable micro-site with data for each state.

Live coverage
Dozens of websites did excellent work covering the election live, reaching viewers who wanted a second screen experience. NPR’s beautiful election dashboard displayed live updates, a gorgeous Tetris-inspired map and results all on one page. Al Jazeera createdexcellent interactives and continued highlighting issues important to voters throughout its live coverage.

Students did a great job collaborating on live coverage. Columbia’s Tow Center partnered with Columbia Journalism Review to providelive coverage and the #jeelection project, a partnership between 24 J-schools across the country, used RebelMouse to compile election coverage. (Interested in best practices for media collaborations? Check out the ONA12 session The Business of Collaboration.)

Demonstrating the power of Data
The New York Times “Paths to the White House” charted ways in which either candidate could achieve enough electoral votes to win the election, and it was updated live as results rolled in. The Times also prepared a valuable “shift map,” which demonstrated how voter sentiment changed between the 2008 and 2012 elections. WNYC’s election night map went beyond the traditional approach and broke down counties by their demographics, using terms like “immigration nation” and “evangelical epicenters.” (Interested in working more with data? Check out the notes from WNYC’s — and ONA Board member — John Keefe’s Into to Data Viz workshop.)

Monitoring voter suppression
Mother Jones put together a map of areas where there were incidents of voter suppression or poll problems, along with an explainer on voting. Partnering on the initiative, the Daily Beast captured information online and on Twitter using the hashtag #troubleVotingfrom voters who reported trouble with casting their votes, and put them in touch with reporters who verified their stories.

Showing the Big Picture
The Washington Post’s supergrid used a beautiful visual timeline to present events throughout the campaign and the election results.

Spelling victory on social media
The election was called before 11:30 p.m. on Tuesday night. The Obama campaign tweeted out “four more years” at 11:16 p.m., a tweetthat has become the most retweeted of all time (over 789, 534 retweets at time of writing). The same message, with the same photo, was posted on the Obama Facebook page, and has become the most liked photo on Facebook, with over four million likes at time of writing.Looking to up your social media game? Check out the ONA12 sessionSocial Media Debate: Best Practices and Bad Habits.

What other great examples of digital coverage did you see? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter by using the hashtag #ONAissues.

OpenNews: Meet the 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellows

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 13:28:28 -0500

OpenNews: Meet the 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellows:

sinker:

This is the third of three posts about the state of development in journalism, where we’re at with the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, and where we’re going in 2013. Yesterday’s post dealt directly with some of our plans for next year, but left an important chunk out. SSo let’s fill in the blank:

When talking about the OpenNews project, I describe it as an ecosystem. All of our programs are interdependent: Hack Days and Code Sprints and Source—they all work together to build, implement, and document new experiments at the intersection of journalism and code. But the living, breathing heart at the center of it all is our Fellowship program.

When the Knight Foundation and Mozilla decided to form a partnership around journalism and the open web, the Fellowship program was conceived as a way of bringing the open-source development ethos right into the center of the newsroom. As the OpenNews project evolved, I saw the Fellowship as serving a different aim as well: To bring new talent into the journalism-code community, in the hopes of growing the number of technologists interested in building anew in journalism.

In 2012, we had five incredible talents who brought their unique ideas and perspectives to some of the world’s best newsrooms. They built next-generation multimedia tools, real-time social sharing analysis, streaming transcription systems, and even picked up bylines along the way in some of the most influential news sites in the world. They traveled the globe attending hack days, sharing their tools, and collaborating on new ideas both big and small.

2012 was our pilot year for the Fellowship program. In 2013, we go big: We increase our fellows from five to eight, and expanded our partner newsrooms to the New York Times and ProPublica in New York, the BBC and the Guardianin the UK, Zeit Online and Spiegel Online in Germany, the Boston Globe (guess where), and La Nacion in Buenos Aires, Argentina. These are incredible news organizations and we’re thrilled to be able to build new things with them.

We ran our 2013 Fellowship search differently than last year: It was a straight call, honed to developers, technologists, data scientists, math geeks, and others. We promoted it massively over the summer, and ended up with twice as many applicants as we were expecting—more than 20x the slots we had to fill. To narrow that huge number down, we submitted a list of the most qualified 56 to our news partners, who then identified a total of 40 semifinalists. Erika Owens, OpenNews’s community manager, and I conducted short, standardized interviews with all 40 semifinalists to build out a more complete candidate profile. About 20 hours of calls later, we submitted all of our notes back to our news partners. They then selected three candidates a piece for hour-long conversations.

Getting to 56 was hard, getting to 40 even harder, and getting to that final list of 24 was nearly impossible (there were surprisngly few overlaps throughout the process). But, after another 24 hours of calls spread across a minimum of three timezones (often four), we arrived at final picks in mid-October.

And today, we get to introduce them to you. I seriously can not wait:

Brian Abelson | New York Times
Brian Abelson is a statistician, journalist, and hacker. He lives in New York and works as a data scientist at the Harmony Institute. He recently graduated with a MA in Applied Statistics from Columbia University where he focused on quantitative and computational approaches to social science. On the side, he edited a book for a prominent political scientist, won a hackathon, and worked on investigative news stories. In previous lives, Brian managed development projects in sub-Saharan Africa, reached number one on Hype Machine, and shared a stage with Spoon and Bob Dylan.

Manuel Aristarán | La Nacion
Manuel Aristarán is a coder-slash-musician. He’s worked on big websites, recommendation engines, logistics and provisioning systems, public data tools and satellite ground station software…all while still trying to play bass and get good music gigs. In 2010, he independently developedGastoPublicoBahiense.org, a tool to browse, visualize, and open the expenditure data published by the municipality of Bahía Blanca, Argentina, his hometown.

Annabel Church | Zeit Online
Annabel Church is a web developer who has worked in a variety of digital media agencies around London, before falling in love with news organisations from the inside out. She is currently working at the Guardian developing tools to aid and abet journalism through live blogging. Particularly, she is passionate about how information and news is represented and presented and what tools can be created to aid journalism. Originating from far away in New Zealand, she enjoys traveling and spends many weekends experiencing the good and the bad of European cuisine.

Stijn Debrouwere | the Guardian
Stijn Debrouwere is a technologist trying to figure out how we can innovate our way out of the news industry’s crisis. In his work as a freelancer and media consultant, he thinks about how information gets created and stored, how it travels around, and how to meaningfully present all that information to users. His work fits somewhere in between UX design, software architecture, taxonomy, and process management. He writes a blog about the future of news at stdout.be.

Friedrich Lindenberg | Spiegel Online
Friedrich Lindenberg is a media scientist turned coder working on open government and transparency initiatives. As a developer and evangelist for the Open Knowledge Foundation, he works on OpenSpending, a platform that aims to make government finance more accessible to citizens around the world. He has also been involved in training journalists to use data and advocating for open government data. Before joining the OKF, Friedrich worked on Adhocracy, a collaborative policy drafting software, now used by a commission of the German parliament and several political organizations.

Sonya Song | Boston Globe
Sonya Song is a doctoral student in Media and Information Studies at Michigan State University. She has worked in both media and IT, taking various roles in newsrooms and Internet start-ups, including reporter, graphic designer, programmer, and product manager. Currently she concentrates on studying social sciences using computational approaches. Particularly, she is curious about Internet censorship and her research on China’s censorship of online news was awarded a Google Policy Fellowship in 2012. Sonya possesses a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science from Tsinghua University in Beijing and master of philosophy in journalism from The University of Hong Kong. Sonya is also an avid photographer and devotee of literature and films.

Mike Tigas | ProPublica
Mike Tigas is a web developer who currently works at the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, WA. His work runs the gamut of everything web-related, from CMS features to interactive data visualizations to assisting with computer-assisted reporting. On the side, he works on Onion Browser, an open source, privacy-enhancing iOS web browser which uses the Tor onion router network. He passes what little spare time he has dabbling in photography, following baseball and college football, and drinking good beer.

Noah Veltman | BBC
Noah Veltman created his first website when he was 12 years old; it had an animated background, a MIDI soundtrack, and lots of blink tags. He’s been creating visualizations, tools, and games for the web ever since, with a focus on making sense out of complex data. He has worked as a web developer, UI designer, and product manager for a variety of Silicon Valley startups, and previously worked with leading tech policy organizations on issues such as online privacy, free speech, and net neutrality.

These are eight of the most talented people I’ve ever had the pleasure of interacting with, and I can’t wait to be able to collaborate with them throughout 2013. What’s past is prologue; in 2013 we do amazing new things together. Join us.

Wow congrats to an incredible group of amazingly brilliant people!

Union Metrics has created a great visualization tool that shows...

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 13:24:07 -0500

Union Metrics has created a great visualization tool that shows the top tags in Tumblr posts and reblogs about the election in real time.

jfkeefe: oreillyradar: In the video above, Michael Flowers...

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 22:43:02 -0500

jfkeefe:

oreillyradar:

In the video above, Michael Flowers speaks at DataGotham 2012 about how New York used data to reduce ambulance response times by a minute. (Hat tip Fred Berenson.)

Earlier this year, Flowers explained how predictive data analytics is saving lives and taxpayer dollars in New York City.

Flowers will be sharing more of his “moneyball for government” experiences at Strata New York this fall.

One of the most inspiring talks I’ve seen about data to action.

The definitive comment on @fivethirtyeight and the election...

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 17:19:01 -0500

The definitive comment on @fivethirtyeight and the election result comes from xkcd - of course.

via @TimHarford

nytgraphics: Shift map, 11:21 PM Best election interactive by...

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 13:02:11 -0500

nytgraphics:

Shift map, 11:21 PM

Best election interactive by a mile

journo-geekery: 512 Paths to the White House: “Select a winner...

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 02:10:30 -0400

journo-geekery:

512 Paths to the White House: “Select a winner in the most competitive states below to see all the paths to victory available for either candidate.”

Shan Carter and Mike Bostock lay out Election Night in Alexander-Calder’esque flowchart form. (Perhaps a mobile of these scenarios will help the anti-Silverdork pundits out there.)

Interactive: explore the 512 combinations of swing states Obama/Romney must win to get to the White House. nyti.ms/RBtiOI
— NYT Graphics (@nytgraphics) November 3, 2012

(Apologies to followers for perhaps overposting NYT stuff. The team is doing such great work in this Election and year I can’t help but share it.)

This is fantastic

"Sun Foundation National Data Happy Hour is starting now, you can tune in online here!..."

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 18:45:12 -0400

“Sun Foundation National Data Happy Hour is starting now, you can tune in online here! http://www.sunlightlive.com/sunlight-foundation-data-happy-hour”

newsbeastlabs: Tracking the presidential groundgame As the two...

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 15:35:53 -0400

newsbeastlabs:

Tracking the presidential groundgame

As the two presidential campaigns launch into their final throws, we wanted to see who had the biggest footprint of campaign headquarters across the country. The map above ran with the resulting story showing Obama with a large advantage, especially in swing states. We thought getting from idea to map / chart would be as easy as checking the candidates’ websites or calling their press offices to request a full list. Not quite.

Finding Romney’s offices

Governor Romney’s campaign didn’t get back to our requests so we dug into their website. Romney only had volunteer offices in 16 states, each of which has a web page and a map showing office locations. Here’s Ohio’s. The data that powers the map is visible if you look at the Javascript files that power it, so we copied the data sixteen states into one file and saved it. They were in JSON file format — but more on that later.

Finding Obamas’s offices

President Obama has offices in many more states than Romney so going state by state is more of a hassle and his campaign’s website doesn’t have the same convenient state-by-state maps. Instead, you input your zip code and it gives you a map of all locations within forty miles of you.

Needless to say, getting a comprehensive list by canvassing the country in 40 mile chunks was out of the question. Digging again into the javascript that powers the website (aside: the Obama website has some slick ASCII art in their source code), their volunteer center finder works by sending out a query that looks like this http://offices.barackobama.com/postal_code/10011/ with your zip code making up the those last five digits. If you put that in your browser and hit return you’ll see the centers closest to the Daily Beast offices in Manhattan.

It automatically looks within 40 miles of you but if you add “?distance=1000” at that url, it will search within however many miles you want.

So if you add the zip code for the rough geographic center of the US, Lebanon, Kansas and a distance of 10,000 miles you get something that looks like this:

http://offices.barackobama.com/postal_code/66952?distance=10000

which will give you a list, in JSON again, of every volunteer center in the country.

This list returns a lot of information we didn’t immediately need, though, like hours of operation and email address contacts. We wrote an R script that took just the fields the we needed for our map, mostly the latitude and longitude, city, and state and made a clean spreadsheet in CSV format.

From there we were able to do counts by state and plot them on a map. Once we had the final count, the Obama campaign confirmed that our number was in the right ballpark.

BONUS: Obama’s offices all include a Foursquare ID. If you want to play around with them, here’s the data, right click and choose “Save Links As…” if it doesn’t download automatically. Some interesting things could be finding the mayors of the obama campaign offices, which location has the most check-ins, check-ins over time in different locations etc. — let us know at newsbeastlabs@gmail.com and we’ll put up your stuff.

The jobless rate dropped in Ohio and five other states where...

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 14:38:43 -0400

The jobless rate dropped in Ohio and five other states where President Obama and Mitt Romney are concentrating their campaign battle, according to Labor Department data |http://bloom.bg/S2y09n

INTERACTIVE: Explore more data on the economic health and political status of the U.S. with our State-By-State visualizer |http://bloom.bg/RwdrSB

futurejournalismproject: Source The Knight-Mozilla OpenNews...

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 18:38:39 -0400

futurejournalismproject:

Source

The Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project has launched Source, a repository of “journalism code” and articles about it.

For example, there’s currently Ruby client for interacting with the New York Times’ campaign finance API and a Guardian Javascript library to manage data behind client-side visualizations.

As OpenNews lead Daniel Sinker describes it on his Tumblr:

Through feature articles that dig into the specifics of the code and the motivations that behind it, through an index to open code repositories produced by the journo-code community, and an index to that community itself, Source connects the many lines of code that make up journalism today with the people that write them. We’ve built relationships between code, people, and organizations deep into the data models of Source because we know that code is always a reflection of the individuals that create it and that those individuals combine to create a thriving community.

Source: Journalism code and the people who make it.

The Copy Editor: ONA 2012: The best technology tools for journalists

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 22:32:28 -0400

The Copy Editor: ONA 2012: The best technology tools for journalists:

gannettona2012:

Back from the Online News Association annual conference, my head is spinning with a few key topics — augmented reality, data visualization, possible resurgence of audio, reporting on the go, data visualization and the role of social media directors. (And did I mention…

reuters: The Reuters Elections 2012 portal has relaunched just...

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 17:29:41 -0400

reuters:

The Reuters Elections 2012 portal has relaunched just in time for Wednesday evening’s presidential debate. View campaign ads, the latest polling figures, a look back at how we voted over the past few decades, opinion and analysis and the latest news from the campaign trail.

Tonight’s Presidential Debate will be live blogged on the portal

REUTERS ELECTIONS: The latest news and analysis from Reuters.com

wnyc: 30 Issues in 30 Days looks at foreclosure in America....

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 12:11:17 -0400

wnyc:

30 Issues in 30 Days looks at foreclosure in America. Check out the map of foreclosures by county, over the last five years. Here.

-Jody, BL Show-

"Why is access to data important? You get up in the morning, you’re getting ready for work and you..."

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 14:05:13 -0400

“Why is access to data important? You get up in the morning, you’re getting ready for work and you ask, should I take the car or the Metro? Should I take the highway or drive on surface streets? Luckily, the local transportation agency is giving out data. Imagine how much more frustrating it would be if you didn’t get a traffic report or a subway system alert at all? Imagine how disastrous it would be if public safety officials didn’t know where emergencies were happening?”

- Chris Wu, in her White House Safety Datapalooza data journalism talk (via copyeditor)

World Bank Dataviz: Seeing Between the Lines: Visualizing Global Poverty Trends

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 17:15:16 -0400

World Bank Dataviz: Seeing Between the Lines: Visualizing Global Poverty Trends :

worldbank:

Over 20 years ago Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen with various collaborators along the way developed the now widely used methods, tools and indicators to monitor the population “living on less than $ a day”. Earlier this year they released the latest update of the World Bank’s…

wnyc: ICYMI: New Yorkers donating much more to Romney and...

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 09:57:55 -0400

wnyc:

ICYMI: New Yorkers donating much more to Romney and conservative Super PACs than to President Obama…

Interactive map of high-dollar NYC donors to Obama and Romney + Money Talking podcast: Why Has Wall Street Abandoned President Obama for Mitt Romney?