“The Counted” uses a dashboard approach, providing a number of different means to compare the number of police killings, for example by to do a comparison by state. The approach puts constant data collection on a new level. That newsrooms keep a record of such data has been a long standing suggestion. http://www.holovaty.com/writing/fundamental-change/

Quote: “The Counted is a project by the Guardian – and you – working to count the number of people killed by police and other law enforcement agencies in the United States throughout 2015, to monitor their demographics and to tell the stories of how they died. The database will combine Guardian reporting with verified crowdsourced information to build a more comprehensive record of such fatalities.”

While the editors do not claim to cover every case, the pattern that is emerging helps to get additional and deeper insight. While interacting with the database I found myself reading quite a number of background biographies about who was killed when and what the reported reasons for the shooting were. The emerging impression is that small causes can lead to violent death. In quite a number of reported killings people acted strangely, aggressively - though the big question is whether other means would have avoided another death.

Enabling comparison 

“The Counted” makes effective use of brief comparisons, by ethnicity, by state and has the total number of reported deaths prominently on top of the page. Furthermore readers can switch between a list view with short profiles of people who have been killed or a map view. Both views offer insights into patterns, backgrounds. It is quite shocking how often police in the US is involved in killings, whatever the background for such cases might be.

As a project this ongoing investigation and collection can use as an example to built upon for other news outlets. Other ongoing topics could be better covered in similar ways - ranging from housing to employment. The latter would be not as high profile as people being killed, but the principle displayed here is a way to keep track in a relevant way.

Strangely the interactive seems to not have a short, direct URL. Instead it is a bit hidden in the depths of The Guardian website.

Building such databases is a challenge and the impact will depend on the topic, for sure. In this particular case though the high interest of the public is the driver for such a data-driven offering

Smaller newsrooms, take note: The means to start these kind of ongoing offerings are becoming easier to handle, do not miss out on such data-driven stories. There are quite a few topics which would deserve consistent tracking - from crime to employment to big construction efforts. Take a long look at "The Counted" and think how other topics could be reported in similar ways. 

Link:
The Counted (Interactive by The Guardian)
 

„I want lifework like typefaces“, says cartographer Daniel Huffman. Much like an „M“ can change it’s shape based on the choosen type set, lines in maps can express a certain style, focus or tell a story. This is why he started a new project called  „Project Linework", where he and some colleagues experiment with hand-drawn map lines, where the shapes provide room for focus, expression and visual difference.

Quote: „…the power of cartography (and its purpose) is that it’s not realistic. It’s highly abstracted and generalized, and reality went out the window once we decided to show a road as being red and give it a stroke width that makes it look hundreds of miles wide, or to replace a city with a black circle. We stylize so many other things on maps, but playing around with the actual shapes of states, islands, or roads, is uncommon.“

Currently there are three initial examples on the website. Whether there will be more variations depends on more contributions. The current files can be downloaded for free, in four different file types: Shapefile, Geojson, Topojson and Adobe Illustrator. There is a GitHub site, too. 

If you are interested in more background about creative mapping, read this post. 

Not directly related to this particular project, but a good example of how to use maps in a creative way is: "Utopian Africa", by  Philippe Rekacewicz. Another, well known example using combination and comparison would be "The True Size of Africa", created by Kai Krause.

Link:
http://www.projectlinework.org

„This story is not about individual war stories and it’s not about survivors. We gonna tally up the tens of millions of people who’s life was cut short by the war“, the author says in the beginning of the video.

Video on Vimeo:
Fallen of World War II

Interactive version:
http://www.fallen.io

An invitation for beginners and experienced data journalists

As part of the festival the School of Data is an invitation for beginners and experienced journalists to tell stories through data - a field of work growing and gaining in importance. A team of about 15 expert panelists and instructors from New York Times, Guardian, Twitter, Journalism++, Knight-Mozilla, School of Data and others will lead participants in a mix of discussions and hands-on sessions aimed to empower participants with the skills they need to produce high quality data stories. The topics will range from revenue models for data driven newsrooms to web scraping and social media data, basic design and visualisation tips and mapping techniques for journalism.

This year’s edition will also include a data expedition - a hand on workshops where participants will have the chance to put in practice their data journalism skills and produce.

Entry to the School of Data Journalism panels and workshops is free and does not require registration. Last year’s editions featured a stellar team of panelists and instructors, attracted hundreds of journalists and was fully booked within days. Previous editions saw the launch of the Data Journalism Handbook,  and the Verification Handbook, go-to references for practitioners in the field.

The full programme of this year’s School of Data Journalism can be found here:
http://journalismfestival.com/programme/2015/category/data-journalism-school

One participants from the last year edition said:

“The School of Data Journalism is an amazing event for journalists of all levels: whether you are a beginner looking to brush-up on basic skills or an experienced geek keen to deepen your knowledge of data tools, the School has something for you. I am a seasoned data journalists and I was amazed how much I learned from last year’s edition!”

Elisabetta Tola, an Italian freelance researcher and data journalist said

“I never used Excel with the idea of producing an article out of it. To go from downloading or producing an Excel table, to organising the information in a way that you can extract or produce a story - that’s one of the things I definitely got from these workshops”

Contacts:
Mirko Lorenz,  Journalist and Information Architect, European Journalism Centre: mirko.lorenz@gmail.com
Milena Marin, School of Data Programme Manager, Open Knowledge Foundation, milena.marin@okfn.org

About the International Journalism Festival (www.journalismfestival.com)
The International Journalism Festival is the largest media event in Europe. It is held every April in Perugia, Italy. The festival is free entry for all attendees for all sessions. It is an open invitation to listen to and network with the best of world journalism. The leitmotiv is one of informality and accessibility, designed to appeal to journalists, aspiring journalists and those interested in the role of the media in society. Simultaneous translation into English and Italian is provided.

About Open Knowledge (www.okfn.org)
Open Knowledge, founded in 2004, is a worldwide network of people who are passionate about openness, using advocacy, technology and training to unlock information and turn it into insight and change. Our aim is to give everyone the power to use information and insight for good. Visit okfn.org to learn more about the Foundation and its major projects including SchoolOfData.org and OpenSpending.org.

About the European Journalism Centre (www.ejc.net)
The European Journalism Centre is an independent, international, non-profit foundation dedicated to maintaining the highest standards in journalism in particular and the media in general. Founded in 1992 in Maastricht, the Netherlands, the EJC closely follows emerging trends in journalism and watchdogs the interplay between media economy and media culture. It also hosts each year more than 1.000 journalists in seminars and briefings on European and international affairs.

As Andy Kirk already noted: The site get’s a lot of coverage and resonates with people on social media platforms. Ask yourself: Why would such a simple exchange create so much interest? Well it's creative. The postcards are lovely. But there is more. This is about asking questions a lot of people have - a quest to „get“ the world as it is is now and how it spins into the future. Like a poem, in data. 

Links:

Dear Data (Site)

Fusion: This Snail Mail data project is an ode to friendship

Fast Company: What happens when data viz designers become penpals

Brain Pickings: Dear Data: Two Designers Visualize the Mundane Details of Daily Life in Magical Illustrated Postcards Mailed Across the Atlantic

Art Market for Dummies is a data visualisation I made last spring, and one of the winners of this year's Data Journalism Awards.

The visualisation tells the story of a topic that is little known outside expert circles - the international art market - and that I myself would have liked to see as a reader. Everyone knows Picasso or Warhol, but few people know that art represents a bigger market than the cinema and the music industry. I am not an expert on this topic myself, so I wanted to create an application that enables users like me to understand the subject quickly and easily, in three minutes. And so I embarked on the creation of this data journalism piece, together with the French publisher Askmedia.

Art Market for Dummies

Many people associate data journalism with serious “hard news” data such as election results, census data, and unemployment rates. I wanted to work with a lighter topic that can surprise the reader (as does data explorer Jon Millward with his porn market database). Of course, I would be delighted to work on a very ambitious data-driven investigation such as ProPublica’s Dollar for Docs, but, when it comes to small newsrooms and freelance journalists like myself, I believe small unconventional projects are the future of data journalism. 

I had already done a visualisation on the topic a year back and was surprised by the large audience it generated. I knew, as a result, that the blend between art and money interested the audience.

When developing the project, I tried to focus on its pedagogical aspects. I once read that journalists must be like guides in a museum. I believe this is an important lesson for data journalists, especially since data visualisations are sometimes beautiful without being easily understandable to readers. I was greatly inspired in this sense by the advice provided by Studio 20´s project, Building a Better Explainer Project, launched in November 2010 by professor Jay Rosen of NYU and ProPublica.

The data for my project comes from various online databases (such as Artprice) as well as press kits. I used the Outwit plugin to extract the data from webpages. This software is absolutely awesome for beginners. I have some notion of programming but I would rather do without the extra work… 

One of the main issues I faced was that the value of artworks was expressed in different currencies. To address this problem, I figured out a way to grab the value of a currency on the day of the auction using the Google Finance API.

On the technical side, I reused many elements I discovered on GitHub (via the Source project): D3.js and Isotope.js for my timeline; a project from MinnPost for the menu; and a great piece of code from Jim Valhingham for the bubble charts. This was the first time I relied so much on GitHub. All these repositories were very well documented and it was fairly easy to adapt the code.

The most important takeaway from this project is the necessity to tell stories with data. One of my visualisations has a series of filters that enables users to sort out the 320 most expensive artworks sold around the world using various criteria (such as nationality of the artist, location of the sale, etc.) The most popular filter by far is the one enabling readers to visualise the gender distribution in the art market. This filter shows that only one woman appears as author among the top 320 of the most bankable artworks in the world. Many people have tweeted this link and said: "It's outrageous, it's so macho!”

Gender distribution visualisation, Art Market for Dummies

I would have liked to find more filters that are able to tell a story as good as this one, but it's not easy. I wanted to know, for example, what the dominant colour in best selling artworks was, in order to answer the question of which colour enables an artist to make more money. I tried using the Image Color Summarizer API, but the result wasn’t very convincing.

To sum up, I learned quite a lot from this project, including from mistakes I made. One of the lessons I learned is not to try to work on the data analysis and on the graphics at the same time. It is very tempting to think: “I am going to create a graphically striking data visualisation", before doing any analyses, but this is a mistake. The process of creating a story in data journalism is identical to traditional journalism: Do not start writing an article before you find a good story. Analyse the data with Pivot Tables in Excel first, to see what story the data can tell. Only then start thinking about what visualisations can be designed. This is the best way to work efficiently without losing time.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is America’s leading source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators. Based in Washington, D.C., The Chronicle has an editorial staff of more than 70, including a Visuals Department responsible for packaging and presentation across platforms.

The Visuals Department includes several teams. The newest team, formed last year, is the Data and Interactives team. Led by Josh Hatch, a veteran of USA TODAY and other major news organizations, the team includes two interactive news developers and a data reporter.

The Data and Interactives team usually works with our staff researchers and reporters to gather and analyze data. We have also crowd-sourced data, as we did with the recent Adjunct Project.

But recently we happened on another source for data that blossomed into a precedent-setting partnership between journalists at The Chronicle and academic researchers at the University of Washington: a massive set of data gathered and analyzed by the university’s Eigenfactor Project. It promised to be a great match from the outset: the authoritative analysis of the Eigenfactor Project combined with the presentation skills of The Chronicle’s team of news app developers.

Women as Academic Authors, 1665-2010 had its origins in the summer of 2011, when Chronicle senior reporter Jennifer Howard interviewed Jevin D. West, a researcher at Eigenfactor, for a story about neuroscience. His work was based on information from JSTOR, the digital library of academic sources.

We later learned that Jevin and his colleagues, including Jennifer Jacquet, had tapped the JSTOR corpus to identify trends in gender representation in scholarly publishing. They were in the process of analyzing about two million articles representing 1,765 fields and subfields over four centuries, from 1665-2010.

We realized that the data was sure to be popular with our core audience of higher education thinkers and academic professionals, and so were eager to work with them. We set out to build a news application that enabled our audience to find their own stories in the data by comparing fields and sub-fields with which they are familiar.

After a few calls to kickoff the project, we established a presence on Basecamp and got down to work in April 2012. On the Chronicle side, Technology Editor Josh Fischman, Senior Reporter Robin Wilson, and Interactive News Designer Josh Keller were assigned to the project.

Jevin briefed Josh on the data and an existing Eigenfactor presentation using some of the same data. They spent most of April and May understanding its complexities. We received our first Excel file of test data on June 1 - the first of many files we received as we worked through the data structure.

Midway through the project, Josh, our lead developer, accepted a position at the New York Times. It was a crucial loss at a critical time during the project’s development, but Brian O’Leary, another Chronicle developer, picked up where Josh left off and thanks to his deep knowledge of higher education data and great coding chops, took over without missing a beat. He added a number of improvements and enhancements in an iterative manner.

In terms of presentation, the data is organized in 24 major fields with which our core audience is familiar. The fields default to alphabetical order, but can be sorted by the percent of authors in the field, or the percent of female authors. Each horizontal bar displays circles sized to indicate the number of authors in each of its subfields. Hovering over a circle reveals the author number and the percent of women. The slightly darker shading of the horizontal bar represents the overall percentage of women authors in the field. Each field is expandable to reveal its subfields.

We initially experimented with having a slider at the top to view the data by increments of 25 years. However, we realized that the variation in data from year-to-year was minimal. There was however a significant difference when viewed in larger increments of time. We finally decided on three tabs. Each tab spans a different timeframe (1665-1970, 1971-1990, and 1991-2010.) A fourth tab is a total for all years.

The project was well received by our audience. It generated much comment from social media, blogs, and other web sites. Chiara Ojeda was one of many who explored the interactive visualization and found stories in the data. She posted takeaways on her blog, Tweak Your Slides. Jessica Hale, in her essay Practicing What We Preach about harassment and advocating for change (published in Academia.edu), cited the project as a reference.

Internally, the project underscores our continued commitment to empower multi-disciplinary project teams, which we encourage to make decisions, experiment, and take risks.

We are now on the lookout for new partnerships to bring together research and analysis by scholars with data visualization and presentation by the Chronicle. We believe this has the potential to become an excellent model that engages our core audience, attracts a new readership, and benefits scholars by providing them with data visualization that can aid them in their continuing research.

Two years ago Kenya launched the Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI). It was a first for sub-Saharan Africa.

For the first time Kenyans would access and interrogate government data from their computer terminals, and cell phones. Before the release of the public data, a journalist’s or a citizen’s search for government records would be a laborious exercise that would begin with seeking a bureaucrat’s approval. If the individual was lucky enough to get the nod to access the information, he or she would be led into a dingy room to thumb through dog-eared files and publications.

But the journalism around KODI – in the weeks and months after the launch of the programme – was an anticlimax. Despite the release of this wealth of information, no in-depth stories were produced. The only stories that emerged were about the news of the launch itself.

Data journalism had not quite arrived in Kenya. 

Prompted by the realization that Kenyan journalists were not using the data available to them to write stories that would impact Kenyans in any way, Internews developed a data journalism course, offering its first training in October 2011. And it has been a fruitful journey so far. Working with the media on data journalism has helped further our organization’s mission to provide Kenyans with information that would help them make better decisions about their lives. It has also helped achieve another Internews goal: to provide Kenyan journalists with the opportunity to adopt more in-depth forms of storytelling.

One such example is business journalist John Gachiri’s story – a data-driven report on the impact of Kenya’s balance of trade on the Kenyan Shilling. What seemed like a straightforward story from a financial journalism point of view turned out to be a challenging enterprise. Gachiri spent weeks mining data made available by government bodies, such as the Kenya Revenue Authority, the Central Bank and the Coffee Board of Kenya – all in vain. Not giving up and bolstered by his new-found nose for data, Gachiri’s single-minded search led him to the Kenya Ports Authority headquarters in Mombasa. He had hit the jackpot, as he found exactly what he was looking for: data on Kenya’s imports and exports – data which even economists did not have.

“This is unbelievable. Is it from a credible source? Our exports have remained flat over the last 30 years with the highest year being 1981 when there were 2.8 million units of exports! Yet our imports have tripled,” said financial analyst and banker, Carol Musyoka, when Gachiri sought her response on the data. 

With support from Internews trainers, Gachiri wrote his story on the impact of Kenya’s balance of trade on the Shilling. What turned sweet smell of coffee farming into bitter brew was published in The Business Daily in Kenya receiving an excellent response from readers.

Gachiri's article, published in The Business Daily

As journalists developed their data driven stories work under the mentorship of Internews data journalism trainers it became apparent that they needed a platform with tools to allow them to learn to produce data stories by doing. This is what led to the establishment of Data Dredger - a space where journalists can mine data that is packaged in an user friendly manner – ready to be used in storytelling. Storytellers can also download compelling visualizations for their stories.

Data Dredger began by using data from KODI, but it also hosts data downloaded from the Kenya Demographic Health Surveys. The team also poured through musty paper files in government ministries in pursuit of data that the government had not yet released.

One of the exemplary projects in Data Dredger took place ahead of Kenya’s national general election earlier this year, when Internews in Kenya conducted an audit of the health sector to highlight challenges and examine the promises the presidential candidates and political parties were making on the provision of health services.

The exercise of examining the presidential and party manifesto data resulted in an assessment or audit, which established that it would take immense resources and many years to fulfill some of the promises the eight presidential candidates said they would implement immediately after taking over the presidency.

Internews highlighted the findings in interactive online fact files consisting of datasets, appealing visualizations and personal accounts. The audit was also presented at a media roundtable that provided tips to journalists on how to challenge presidential candidates on the promises they had made in their party manifestos and during the first presidential debate.

Internews engaged a print editor of one of the national newspapers in the process and at the roundtable he gave the journalists insights into how he had produced his four-page data driven article: Kenya decades away from achieving quality healthcare, by using the audit data. The story, published in The Standard, on the day of the roundtable was the only in-depth health story that interrogated the health promises made by politicians during the election period.

Building on the success of Politics of Health, Kenyan journalists are now warming to data journalism and are increasingly using our platform to dredge up story gems. Some more of the reporting done by Kenyan journalists can be found at the Stories in Kenyan media section of Data Dredger.

A flight from one Berlin airport to another takes 15 minutes. Hundreds of private jets and airliners fly over the German capital at low altitudes without any passengers on board. This is only one of the stories that were uncovered by using the database of our interactive application Flight Paths Tracker, published in April 2013.

Flight traffic above one location in Berlin

The database is updated on a daily basis and contains detailed information on almost 600.000 flights in the Berlin region. Millions of coordinates of flights and noise levels allow us to provide our users with customised data about air traffic above a certain location in an intuitive and friendly way. In addition, this resource is essential to our reporters in their investigations on one of the main discussion topics in Berlin. 

How the idea came about

Everything started with a refusal. We asked the German Air Traffic Control (Deutsche Flugsicherung) to provide raw data in order to match flight paths with certain locations in Berlin. We wanted to show how increased air traffic affects different parts of the city. Air traffic is different every day and depends on weather, wind and the number of airplanes in the sky. Predetermined flight paths can’t be analysed like railway tracks or highways. Pilots sometimes have to leave their originally planned routes. This is the reason why some areas where there should be no planes at all are still affected by noise pollution.

But the German Air Traffic Control refused to provide the radar data we needed. Since we also needed historical flight data for statistical calculations, scraping the data (Java-Plugin), was not an option and nor was using a receiver to get ADS-B transponder data. After several months of research we started to cooperate with Deutscher Fluglärmdienst (DFLD), an NGO that monitors and records air traffic information. They provide historical and recent flight data, including noise calculations.

How we made the app

The Flight Paths Tracker is a Ruby on Rails app running with a PostgreSQL database with a PostGIS extension to do spatial queries. The prototype was built in New York with developers and reporters at ProPublica. In November 2012 I was chosen to be the first P5 (Pair Programming) fellow at ProPublica. Back in Germany, the developers of Kreuzwerker GmbH helped us to finalize the interactive application based on that prototype.

At the same time we got about three gigabytes of CSV files (96% of all the flights over Berlin since January 2011) from the DFLD. We analysed them using mainly SQL queries with pgAdmin. We exported the data, visualized it with Datawrapper, QGIS, Google Earth and Excel and double-checked for consistency using ProPublica’s data bullet-proofing guide.

Flight traffic for all districts in the Berlin area

How we presented the data

We had two objectives concerning the frontend. Firstly, we wanted to display flight traffic above one’s location in 3D. This way the user is able to distinguish single flights as they are expanded horizontally. The rendering is done directly in the browser with CSS and SVG - without any use of plugins. Secondly, we wanted to visualise a long-term analysis of how air traffic evolves over Berlin. We implemented that by using a simple choropleth map.

We started by using the Google Maps API. But Google’s terms of use don’t allow any 3D presentation of their normal maps. So we used Mapbox instead. We used Tilemill for styling and Leaflet.js as library. As a geocoder we first used Nominatim, the service based on Open Street Maps. It actually worked fine, but it doesn’t have every street number. And for the Flight Paths Tracker we needed exact locations. Since the Google geocoder can only be used with Google Maps, we chose to work with the Yahoo Placefinder.

It was also very important that the news app would be working on mobile devices. Therefore we used responsive design. We used deep links to make sure that users are able to easily share the results of the Flight Paths Tracker wherever they are in the app.

Lessons learned

The implementation of the 3D map was particularly tricky. Even though it is the key feature of the application, it’s based on experimental features. We had trouble (especially with Chrome and iOS) displaying a large number of flight paths, so we had to limit them. The 3D map doesn’t work with Internet Explorer yet, because the browser does not support the "preserve-3d" property.

Due to tight deadlines it was impossible to include features and ideas we developed while working on the application. The lesson learned is that we have to work in a more agile fashion.

Impact and next steps

The Flight Paths Tracker is work in progress. The data is updated on a daily basis and automatic analysis is provided on a monthly basis. Every day several hundred people use our interactive application. Right now we are working on additional articles and last week we established a Twitter account (@flugroutenradar) that automatically tweets interesting data about flight traffic above Berlin from the API of the news app.

We generated front-page news in print and lead stories online. Even Berlin's politicians reacted to the results. People affected by flight-related noise pollution sent countless letters thanking us for the new source of information. The news app has also been mentioned as best practice example in blog posts and at conferences. Furthermore, we are honoured to be included on the shortlist of the Data Journalism Awards 2013.

Note: A how-to post in German is available on my blog, digitalerwandel.de.