Ana_Cotta – saudades da Amazônia

Tools, Events, Courses

On Wednesday the 30^th, the eighth edition of the International Journalism Festival will take place in Perugia. The event has become one of the most important of its kind in Europe, and it will host hundreds of journalists from all over the world.

The IFJ will also be the location of the third edition of the 2014 School of Data Journalism jointly organized by the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation. The School will start on the May the 1^st and will see the participation of 25 instructors from world-leading newspapers, universities, and think tanks.

ProPublica just announced the release of two JavaScript libraries. The first one is Landline and will help developers turn GeoJSON data into SVG browser-side maps. The second is built on the previous one and is called Stateline and will facilitate the process of creating US choropleth maps.

Data Stories

Chris Michael from the Guardian Data Blog recently published a short article listing the world’s most resilient cities. Michael extracted data from a study of Grosvenor, a London-based company which measured resilience by assigning a value to cities’ vulnerability to environmental changes and their capacity to face political or economical threats.

British citizens might be interested in the quality of air they breathe everyday. Those who are worried about air pollution should take a look at George Arnett’s interactive choropleth map showing the percentage of deaths caused by particulate air pollution in England.

What’s the role of the world tech giants in politics? Tom Hamburger and Matea Gold tried to explain it in this article on the Washington Post by observing the evolution of Google in its lobbying activities at the White House. Google’s political influence increased enormously since 2002 thus making the company the second largest spender in the US on lobbying practices.

Are conservatives all conservatives in the same way, or is there a certain degree of moderation among them and toward different issues? On his newly-born FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver faces the argument by displaying data on the “partisan split” between the two US parties on several main topics.

If you are Catholic, or maybe just curious, you should be very interested in seeing The Visual Agency’s last infographic, which represents through a series of vertical patterns the number, geographical area, and social level of professions of all Catholic saints.

Gustavo Faileros, ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellowship, is about to present to the public InfoAmazonia, a new data journalism site which will be monitoring environmental changes in the southern part of South America using both satellite and on-the-ground data.

In addition, as environmental changes increase, so do the number of deaths of environmental and land defenders. The Global Witness team has just published its latest project, Deadly Environment, a 28-page report containing data and important insights on the rise of this phenomenon which is incredibly expanding year by year, especially in South America.

Data Sources

Michael Corey is a news app developer who was involved in the realization process of the National Public Radio mini-site named Borderland. In this post, he analyses the main features of the geographical digital tools that he used to collect and display data on the US-Mexico border which helped him correctly localizing the fences build by the US government all along the line which separates the two Countries.

The data-driven journalism community is expanding rapidly, especially on Twitter. If you need a useful recap of what has been tweeted and retweeted by data lovers, then the Global Investigative Journalism Network #ddj top ten is what you need.

Doug88888 – Bangkok

Tools, Events, Courses

Just in case you’ve not yet come across it – you still have a couple of weeks left to participate to the 2015 Data Journalism Awards. The competition is open to anyone and rewards eight winners with a 2.000 dollars prize each, and the deadline is April 4, 2014.

On Thursday 27 the Open Data Institute will hold the one-day course Introduction to open data for journalists: finding stories in data. Don’t miss the chance, book now!

A new data design tools is about to be released under open source license. It is called Lyra and it is an interactive software which allows you to build graphs and charts without having to write long time-consuming code.

Data Stories

Not all rich people behave the same way with the money they earn. Take a minute to look at this curious infographic from Adweek which tells you what differences there are among millionaires.

US citizens might be interested in knowing where their GDP comes from, and here is the answer: take a look at The case for big cities, in 1 map from the Washington Post.

Climate change is one of the big issues of the century. This interactive map from the Guardian Data Blog team clearly shows how it causes extreme weather events around the world. Click on the markers and you can get a picture of the last month most unnatural weather conditions.

Selfiecity is surely among the top data journalism projects of this week. This website is an investigation about self-portraits in five cities of the world. Browse it to get insights from the demographics of 3200 people and their relative poses in front of the camera.

Data Sources

Do you want to know which are the four pillars of data visualization according to complexdiagrams.com? Read about them here and you will also find useful links to several design resources.

Analyticsweek.com published the list of the top 200 most influential leaders in the field of big data. Scroll it down and choose who to follow on Twitter.

If you’re making an infographic and on the hunt for good icons to insert in your piece – your search is over! Check out this set of Open Data icons, produced by FivebyFive.io for Open Data Day.

Credits

Thanks to @mihi_tr @zararah

Joriel “Joz” Jimenez – Lego Castle Advent Calendar

Every data addict knows that each file containing numbers in rows and columns must be filtered and cleaned first. The Data Cleanser help you doing it by rapidly removing duplicates. Try it here.

The Partnership for Open Data officially launched the Impact Stories Competition. Submit a story on how open data has positively changed the community you live in and get the chance to win 1000 dollars.

Data Stories

The Guardian Data Blog ranked the biggest cities in the world according to their cost of living and to the average price paid for a 1kg loaf of bread. Read more about how the economy is changing in countries’ capitals here.

Matthew C. Klein works for the Bloomberg View and recently succeeded in transforming complex financial and economic data into a story told through a series of attractive visualizations. How We Spend is the title of the project, and it absolutely deserves to be seen.

As I am a fan of curious infographics, here is one on the saying Practice Makes Perfect from Daily Infographic.

Shane O’Neill from InformationWeek interviewed Phil Simon, technology expert and author of the book ‘The Visual Organization’ where he discusses the importance of turning data into visualizations. Take a look at it here.

If you are passionate about history and you live in Washington D.C., here is an interesting article from the Washington Post on D.C. historic houses you might want to see.

Young or aspiring data journalists may take inspiration from this (very short) interview with Duarte Romero Varela, a graduate student from Birmingham University who talks about his first impressions of working for Infogr8.

Have you ever seen conditional probability visualized? No? Well, now you can admire this beautiful visual explanation of it made by Victor Powell for Setosa.

The Economist published an interesting short article showing when and how Lego became one of the leading toy brands in the world. Read about its expansion in ‘Empire Building’.

Data Sources

Dyanna Gregory and Trina Chiasson from Infoactive are leading a wonderful project called Data Made Simple aimed at realizing a free e-book on the fundamentals of data visualization. Help them here by filling a short survey.

Pie charts are probably the most hated way to represent data. If you tired of them and you are looking for good alternatives Helpmeviz explain here how to avoid and replace them with better graphs.

Credits

Thanks to @EdRamthun and @stelldirvornet!