2. Source: The Handbook of Data Journalism
Paul Bradshaw – Birmingham City University
“In the past we, as an industry, relied on being the only ones
operating a technology to multiply and distribute what had
happened over night. The printing press served as a
gateway, if anybody wanted to reach the people of a city or
region the next morning, they would turn to newspapers.
This is over!!!! Today news stories are flowing in as they
happen, from multiple sources, eye-witnesses, blogs and
what has happened is filtered through a vast network of
social connections, being ranked, commented and more
often than not ignored. This is why data journalism is so
important. Gathering, filtering and visualizing what is
happening beyond what the eye can see has a growing
value.”
3. What is Data Journalism?
Both ‘data’ and ‘journalism’ are troublesome terms.
People usually think of ‘data’ as any collection of
numbers, most likely gathered on a spreadsheet.
20 years ago, that was the only sort of data that
journalists dealt with.
But we live in a digital world now, a world in which
almost anything can be — and almost everything
is — described with numbers.
4. Data Journalism
Data journalism divides into three broad types that often
overlap:
1. Traditional investigative data journalism, often called CAR -
finding stories in the data – with or without visualisations
2. Using the data to tell a story or explain a complex problem –
this will involve graphics or ‘visualisations’
3. Providing a service or a tool that tells the reader something
personally relevant - school score cards / tables or simple
financial tools and calculators
5. What makes data journalism different
to the rest of journalism?
The possibility to combine the traditional ‘nose
for news’ and the ability to tell a compelling
story, with the sheer scale and range of
digital information now available.
6. How is this related to language?
The language of this journalism genre is Data!
Data go through a Communication Process and
are part of multimodal journalism and visual
grammar
Little points of information that are often not
relevant in a single instance, but massively
important when viewed from the right angle.
7.
8. What is Visual Grammar?
Communication requires language
That language can be oral as in the spoken word, it can be
gestural as in sign language, or it can be visual as in
design.
The more you understand any language the better you can
communicate using that language.
The visual language of design is no exception.
9. Interested in the topic?
“The reason for writing a
grammar of visual language
is the same as for any
language: to define its basic
elements, describe its
patterns and processes, and
to understand the
relationship between the
individual elements in the
system. Visual language has
no formal syntax or
semantics, but the visual
objects themselves can be
classified.”
14. Data Journalism is also intertwined with Citizen Journalism
It can be a form of Participatory Journalism
15. Data Journalism Tips
• It is the stories in the numbers that are interesting NOT the numbers by
themselves
• Give your data a human face if you can with case studies or by making it
personally relevant
• Investigative journalism can take a long time – Keep focused and work
with experts for the best outcome: investigative / data journalists,
statisticians, developers, designers
• Clean your data and triple check it – there are ALWAYS errors
• Plan publication and partner with a range of outlets for maximum
coverage
• Always have a page where you explain your methodology
• Be prepared to respond to critics and staff to cover corrections and
feedback
16. Data Visualisation Tips
• Help your readers to understand something complex, don’t
just make data art
• Keep your user in mind all the time. Remember you are not
a normal user so your judgement is not the best yardstick
• Always test your designs with users and iterate on the
feedback
• Be aware some people hate graphs. You will never win them
over
• Circles can be perceived as more ‘friendly’
• Sequential ‘NEXT’ options will often get more clicks than
‘EXPLORE’
• Consider audio commentary or using video production tools
like after effects to give an overview
17. Data tools or apps
Provide information that users will find personally
relevant and useful
If appropriate allow users to share a key fact about
themselves to boost reach and make it feel more
personal
A global dataset will be relevant to far more users
and will get more shares
18. Tools
• Excel, Google Docs and fusion tables.
• Sometimes MySQL and Access databases and Solr for interrogating larger
data sets and used
• RDF and SPARQL to begin looking at ways in which we can model events
using linked data.
• Developers will use their programming language of choice, whether
that’s ActionScript, Python or Perl, to match, parse or generally pick
apart a dataset we might be working on.
• Google and Bing Maps and Google Earth along with Esri’s ArcMAP for
exploring and visualising geographical data.
• High charts javascript library for some data visualization
• Adobe After Effects – motion graphics software
• Carto DB
• Data Wrapper
26. The Migrants Files (2013)
The Migrants Files is a project by a European consortium of journalists that
aimed at precisely assessing the number of men, women and children that
died as a result of EU Member States migration policies.
27. Financed by Journalismfund.eu, the team of journalists started putting
together all the data available on migrants casualties since 2000.
Video Presentation: https://vimeo.com/97210043
Data: https://www.detective.io/detective/the-migrants-files/
What they found out:
• By aggregating sources together, they showed that the number of sourced
dead and missing migrants is 50% higher than current estimates.
• Mortality rates between migration routes vary widely, from 2% in the
Canaries to 6% near Malta and Lampedusa. EU Member States constantly
close the routes with low mortality, pushing migrants towards the more
dangerous ones.
• No EU Member State or EU institution has data on migrants death. For
some Member States, dead migrants “aren’t migrating anymore, so why
care?”, in the words of a public official.
• When it comes to talking of “lives saved” and security of migrations,
politician and border guards engage in shameless lies and whitewashing of
their activities and programs, renaming surveillance and push-back
activity into search and rescue operations.
28. The Web as a data source
More info:
http://datajournalismhandbook.org/1.0/en/ge
tting_data_4.html
