Chris Martino – US Capitol Building

Tools, Events, Courses

You still have a bit of time left to participate in the Data Visualization contest launched by crisistextline.org, which aims at making the extent of the teen crisis (bullying, self-harm, abuse) social phenomenon in the US more accessible and understandable. The final deadline to submit your visualization prototype is May 2.

The Knight Center for Journalism will soon launch another great MOOC called “Investigative Journalism for the Digital Age”. The course lasts five weeks and will start on May 12.

Data Stories

The elections for the US senate are about to come, and bets on the winner party have already started. But if you need a much deeper statistical point of view on the event, take a look at “Who Will Win the Senate?” from the New York Times (with interactive graphics made by Mike Bostock).

Sarah Slobin is a data journalist who works as graphic editor at the Wall Street Journal, and she wrote a very interesting article on Source explaining why transforming data into visualizations is not always the right thing to do and why it is important to link the human element to the numbers.

What can we expect from data journalism in the future? What is to come after the launch of FiveThirtyEight and the Upshot? ProPublica’s assistant managing editor Scott Klein analyses the state of the art of DDJ in an interview published on the Tow Center website.

Another interesting perspective on open journalism is that of Simon Rogers, surely among the most heard voices on the web when it comes to data and storytelling. This is his appeal: “Hey Wonk Reporters, Liberate Your Data”.

What role will data visualization play in the climate change debate? Will it help clarifying misunderstandings and promote a better confrontation or will it keep things as they are? Read Megan Albon’s opinion on yaleclimatemediaforum.org.

Internews just concluded the first ever data journalism training event in Afghanistan.

Data Sources

Arthur Charpentier published a long, long, long list of interesting readings, visualizations, and blog posts for data lovers. Scroll it down on “Data News: Why the Boom in Big Data Journalism Makes Sense & More”.

Even though it may seem easy at first, selecting the right colors for your visualization is always a hard task. The guide “UX color theory” is a very useful guide that 5AM Solutions recently published and made available for free to anyone who wishes to know more about colors.