Ars Electronica – Brain Art

Tools, Events, Courses

The Argentinean La Naciòn Data Blog continues to foster citizen participation in collecting and using open data. This time it did it by presenting VozData, a shared platform through which people can transform complex public documents into easily readable databases.

Do you want to put your visualization skills into practice? The Infographic Competition: Visualizing the Scale of the Brain gives you the opportunity to do it. Hurry up: the deadline is on April 30^th.

Data Stories

The Guardian Data Blog recently published two interesting data journalism pieces we would like to recommend. The first is an article on Death Penalty Statistics written by Leila Haddou which summarizes the state of the art of executions in the world. The second is an interactive map showing country-by-country data on Europe’s young adults living with parents by Ami Sedghi and George Arnett.

If you are a fanatic about cars, you should take a quick look at Exploring Your Car’s European Roots, which displays the most important historical achievements in car and motor production.

The Data Desk of the Los Angeles Times recently released Crime L.A., a daily updated map which shows both violent and property crime trends in more than 200 neighborhoods of the city.

Google Flu Trend certainly was one of the biggest experiment in predictive analytics ever done in the recent history. Read Kaiser Fung’s point of view on why it represented a failure and Alexis Madrigal’s arguments in its defense.

Sam Wang from The New York Times published an article with data on autism showing the difference between the attention paid to the topic by the press and the scientific evidence.

Cartography is surely much better now that the second version of the Map of the Internet has just been released. The display of the oceans and the lands of the virtual world absolutely deserves applause and five minutes of your time.

Data Sources

The Washington Data Community is about to start a completely new version of their weekly newsletter. Subscribe to it and you will also get useful data job alerts.

A list of visualization tools is always worth reading. Code Geekz assembled one that may interest you containing 30 links.

Mike Leeorg – New York City Skyline Sunset

Tools, Events, Courses

Interested in joining and developing a data journalism project? Medialab Prado is looking for collaborators for its “Workshop on Data Journalism: Transforming Data into Stories”. Participants will work in groups to produce selected projects ranging from “Globalization and health trends” to “Climate Finance Maps”. Workshops take place on two editions: 25-27 October and 13-15 December. Hurry up! The deadline for registration is October 24.

If you are curious about the dimension of your Facebook network you may want to have a look at the first DataJLab video tutorial on Gephi. Gephi is platform that helps you visualizing complex series of relations and, above all, is available for free to anyone!

Next week every New Yorker should not miss the appointment with two of the biggest events on the world of data. On Monday 27^th starts the NYC Data Week and, right the day after, the Strata Conference opens the doors to the public. It’s going to be an intensive agenda of workshops, speeches and meetups for anyone interested in analyzing and visualizing numbers and statistics: journalists, information architects, designers, entrepreneurs, start-uppers and many more.

Data Stories

The legendary Guardian Data Blog recently published an interesting analysis of the diversity of languages spoken in England. In “What does the 2011 Census tell us about diversity of languages in England and Wales?” the University College London geographer Guy Lansley, author of the article, displays the distribution of idioms in the Country through a series of dot maps based on data released by Office for National Statistics.

If you are wondering what kind of role data analysis and data intelligence play in big news industries nowadays then you should absolutely read Ken Doctor’s point of view on the Nieman Journalism Lab where he describes and presents “The newsonomics of Little Data”.

Want to know which is the English Silicon Valley? Read and explore John Burn-Murdoch’s map of Britain’s technology sector hotspots on Financial Times.

For those with a true passion for cars and movies Cool Infographics posted “Car of the Silver Screen”, a long nice-looking graph showing all the most famous characters’ supercars: from the legendary Sean Connery’s Aston Martin DB5 in “007 Goldfinger” to the most recent Audi R8 e-tron driven by Robert Downey Jr. in “Iron Man 3”.

Data Sources

Data journalists from La Nacion just released the beta version of Declaraciones Juradas Abiertas, a huge database listing assets, holdings and properties of Argentinian public servants aimed at increasing public administration transparency towards citizenship.